Comment by nebula8804
2 days ago
The world runs on Excel. It is the largest development environment by far and no fancy language/framework can come close to touch it. The reason is because it acts as the glue to get real life things done in everything from large governments, militaries, large corporations all the way down to the small bed and breakfast operation across the entire world. Normal people have gotten real processes built by just twiddling around in Excel.
Sadly, Excel and the dumbness of the environment generated disasters on Genomics (and tons of other research areas too) causing millions if not billions of losses. Hint: skewed experiments/data and so on, making years of effort worthless.
That woudn't happen under BioPython/BioPer/Rl and a custom dedicated interface with no data mangling at all.
Poeple in the 90's joked about how MS turned the whole IT industry 20 years back. Now, literally, and not just IT.
And that's sad, because you have Turbo Pascal, Windows NT, the VB6 IDE against C/C++ libraries... good products on MS where data correctned was granted with low level libraries called from VB. For sure BLAS/Lapack would exist in the 90's as products for Visual C/C++.
Reusing MS Office for advanced tasks was the key of the shitty computing we were suffering on tons of places. Such as the idiots using Excel tables for Covid patients instead of having a proper SQL database. Even SQlite (IDK about the constraints, maybe it fits) could have been a better choice.
People said with Unix "Worse it's beter". He, nowadays even NDB 'databases' would grant you correctness on scientific data (it's plain text with tuples) that these rotten binary, propietary, office bound pseudo databases and spreadsheets. Or even AWK with CSV's/TSV's.
You're forgetting that Excel is the most ergonomic programming language in the world, full stop, nothing else even comes close. Until it's as easy to build something with those other things as it is to whip up a sheet in Excel, they're not leaving the starting gate when it comes to usage, especially by people who are not professional software devs
Ergonomic? Who cares? By 'ergonomic' a notebook it's zillions better than Excel or even Org-mode from Emacs when you don't even have to deal with the limited input from the cells, or worse, localized functions in spreadsheets. Go try debugging some functions in Spanish or German being yourself a native English speaker.
The most ergonomic programming environment in the world today it's a mix between a notebook and a REPL with live changes. Something like a cross between Smalltalk and Jupyter, and that doesn't exist yet. Org-mode for Elisp it's close as it allows you to do literate programming, a REPL and such in a 'live' and documented way.