Sometimes I really like a spreadsheet. I found out at work that spreadsheets all have map / reduce now. That's fun. If there were a spreadsheet interface that was secretly R under the hood and tricked me into understanding R that would be neat.
Spreadsheets are perhaps the only pseudo-visual programming tool to have achieved significant widespread use, but they are terrible:
- the logic is hidden; until you click on a cell, you don't know "what it actually contains"
- there is no entry point, no main(), so there is no way to read it other than keeping 100% of what the sheet does in your head, or ignoring parts of it and risking breaking them while working on others
- the logic tends to be coded in single lines rather than multi-line with proper indentation, which makes reading it very difficult
This is just the conceptual basis, without even counting the improper auto-formatting of cells that has even led to renaming genes to prevent them from being considered dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... or the absurdities regarding date calculations.
They can be convenient when you have to play around with a few pieces of tabular data, yes, but the price you pay is much higher than working with high-level languages that would be easy for even the average user to understand if only they had started with them.
