Comment by Sharlin
1 day ago
But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.
1 day ago
But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.
Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
I'd need a pretty strong argument to believe the world would be better absent spreadsheet programs.
My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.