Comment by aarondia

Glad to hear you're a fan! You're right, Mito is not designed to cover all of Excel's use cases. Mito focuses on rectangular datasets that fit nicely into a pandas dataframe ... at least for now. So the types of use cases that we're looking for is data cleaning, pivoting, etc. If you're building an LBO, Mito is not the tool for you.

It seems like what your proposing is almost a wrapper around pandas functionality to make the language easier to read for Excel users. I think that's a super interesting approach which we honestly haven't thought that much about. As a rule of thumb for Mito right now, any spreadsheet formula gets generated as a Mito formula (ie: using an IF statement in the Mito spreadsheet generates the code IF(A > B, 1, 0) instead of the Pandas code) and anything else is raw pandas code (ie: pivot tables, merges, add column).

In general, we've been thinking about trying to move more of the code to the raw python approach since we've heard things like "not seeing the raw script makes the code unproductionizable" etc. But I also see your point that beginning Python users might prefer readable code over Python code. If we took that approach, users would still get the reproducibility, auditability, and ability to use a spreadsheet interface on large datasets, they'd just sacrifice any semblance of learning Python. That's great food for thought!