the magic power of spreadsheets is that they encourage improvisation, and it probably applies to that one.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.
and _that_ is why I'm still very sad that Lotus Improv didn't make it in the marketplace --- gathering all the formulae into one pane was _incredible_ for organization and providing a single top-level view of what a spreadsheet was doing.
I really wish Flexisheet would get to a usable point, or that Quantrix wasn't so expensive.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.