I am fascinated by the continued prevalence of excel in many industries. It feels as if some modern scripting language should be able to replace some aspects of the spreadsheet and work much better.
Excel is great for prototyping. It produces immediate results without any configuration. And it saves your database along with your code in a single file.
This is huge. Can you name any other programming language that automatically saves database + code in a single file?
Think about how many files you have to share if you use a script + database. At least 2 files. And then you have to zip it and the recipient has to unzip it. (cluttering your downloads folder)
However, at a certain point you have to make the jump and install/configure a database, even if it's just SQLite.
> some modern scripting language should be able to replace some aspects of the spreadsheet and work much better
To begin with, it should be a single package without dependencies, just like excel is. Not some "ecosystem" where you need to install certain versions of packages for your script to work.
I'm not so much fascinated as scared by how many investment banks are heavily reliant on Excel.
A former co-worker used to work in London for a bank, his job was to maintain the linked Excel spreadsheets that were business critical - and only took six hours to produce a result.
He found moving to the Java ecosystem rather relaxing and uncomplicated in comparison.
