There is even a successful competitive scene:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/06/experie... https://excel-esports.com/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xw9w976jo
replyThey are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.
replyWe suck at excel because we recognize that it has a bad data model and avoid it. So when we want to calculate something we pick something with better structure. something more pleasant to use than the spreadsheets "it's a big bag of cells" approach.
replyReally, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now that I have better tools I don't enjoy doing work in them anymore.
I feel it's the extreme of "static vs dynamic languages". In Excel, even variables (cells) are dynamic, not fixed names in a lexical scope.
replyThe reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically.
I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).