I cannot overstate just how much I love working on stuff in Excel and Google Sheets. It's the most popular programming language because it's incredibly intuitive to people at all levels of programming experience (especially the "none" level), it offers instant feedback, and in many cases, the results are trivially verifiable.

It does have its flaws, that you've pointed out - there's no good way to write tests, I'm not aware of any good way to have any sort of source control, and modularity is basically non-existent.

But, damn - if I have a bunch of data I need to go through and/or present, Sheets is usually my go-to. I genuinely love it when my spouse asks me to troubleshoot some Sheets stuff for her.

> AI vibe-coding is probably filling in the middle-ground [..] and it is accretive in the sense that someone can build on top of it

To me 'accretive work' means something you do at a lower level than your task at hand which by itself doesn't count progress, but rather lay the groundwork for it so it's compounding from there on. AI has nothing to do with this.

I'll take that one step further and claim that Excel is the world's most popular VISUAL programming language.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668885

>Spreadsheet certainly are visual programming languages: by any measure, by far one of the most common most widely used types of visual programming languages in the world.