The quiet usefulness of the humble spreadsheet

More people write formulas in spreadsheets than write code in any language, by a wide margin, and almost none of them would call it programming. It is. A grid of cells that recompute when one changes is a live program, written by someone who needed an answer and did not wait for permission.

The spreadsheet's genius is that it has no separation between the data, the logic and the result. You can see all three at once and poke any of them. Professional tools separated these for good reasons and lost, in the process, the thing that made the spreadsheet usable by a shop owner on a Tuesday night.

It is also fragile, undocumented and prone to a wrong cell reference bringing down a quarter's figures. Every spreadsheet disaster is a reminder of how much work is being done in it. The tool is not going away. The respectful thing would be to teach people to use it well.