Comment by bdangubic
1 month ago
> These are the same people that create applications in MS Excel.
Ones that want their application to work? :) the last piece of software you should be knocking is MS Excel, in my 30+ year career the one common thread just about everywhere I worked (or contracted at) has used Excel to run some amazing sh*t
Everywhere I've worked as a software engineer the past 30 years I've seen Excel spreadsheets but rarely anything amazing, maybe once back in the 1990's at one place by an Excel guru but those are rare. 00% of the time Excel is used to make essentially table layouts of data maybe with some simple cell calculations.
I dunno much but I do know that if you can start a business that replaces Excel spreadsheets with an application(s) that your business builds you'd be the World's first trillionaire (many "tri" over) :)
Excel (or similar spreadsheet programs) is indeed great and has it's place. There are certain area's where there is no real replacement which is impressive. However I think that creating (interactive) applications is not one of the jobs Excel is the best tool for the job.
This exactly the argument I try to make Excel (spreadsheets) is a great interface for processing and working with certain type of data, think economic etc. but it is not great for other things. There we need a different interface to efficiently communicate our intent. For example programming languages or even writing a novel would not work very well in a Excel sheet (though no doubt someone has attempted it).
I think programmets often underestimate the power of Excel for non-programmers, it in practice runs the business world.
I think that it also is a comparable to the ai side we see now. Do something for real, use real database or programmer. Non-programmer needs something, vibe code or excel