11 July, 2019

I was wrong about spreadsheets, and I’m sorry

I ridiculed the spreadsheet jockey. I dismissed their power. I was an asshole about spreadsheets. I just didn’t get it. I asked why people didn’t “learn to program,” and all the while, I was using tools which were clearly less sophisticated than Excel.
When you want to solve a problem with Excel, here’s what you do:
  1. Open up Excel
That’s it. From there, you can calculate literally anything, and transmit not only the results of those calculations, but the actual environment itself, to anyone in the world, and expect that if they have a computer, they can replicate your results.
There I was, solving problems with a pile of functional but precarious software, glued together by the trends of the day … and I was judging Excel.

Programming should be more like Excel