> Anyone who thinks DSLs for the general public can't work has never used Excel.
I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay.
But apart from that there's too much freedom in Excel to be used to make anything properly. Every time I've ever seen a non programmer use it, they make a pile of spaghetti. You never have any assurance that you're actually calculating what you want.
Even highly qualified domain experts (eg in derivatives trading) will end up building utter nonsense in Excel, and then use it to trade millions of dollars worth of exotics. Whenever they need something fixed, it takes an enormous effort to trace through all the cells to make sure things are correct.
Excel is a great example of a domain-user tool that's very hard to use correctly, and even harder to know when you're using it incorrectly; that's not "snobbism".
Totally agree. Whole companies run on Excel spreadsheets maintained by non programmers. Maybe they are not up the quality of good software engineers but they are good enough. When I was contractor I saw in one company the IT department taking over all Excel spreadsheets and creating "proper" software. It was a total disaster. Instead of same day turnaround users had to wait requirements and then wait for months often. Costs went up, productivity down. Good software engineering practices have their place but if something works we should leave it alone.
I don't think it is snobbishness. Some programming systems definitely encourage hacky spaghetti more than others (if you don't believe me try using LabVIEW) and Excel is definitely in that category.
There are ways that they could make it less so, like only allowing cell references by name, using a saner scripting language than VBA, allowing multiple cell grids on a single page/sheet, etc.
"Millions of successful businesses are built on Excel" is no argument at all. You can build a successful business with pen and paper.
I'd love to hear your take on the rise of "notebook" environments. :)
Directly stated, I don't feel any dissonance agreeing with both of your posts. I do think it is snobbish behavior. I also believe some environments make for worse results on some problems. There is usually room for both.
I would say Excel is exactly the opposite of a positive example. Unless you mean being used as a sort of electronic scratchpad, which works okay.
But apart from that there's too much freedom in Excel to be used to make anything properly. Every time I've ever seen a non programmer use it, they make a pile of spaghetti. You never have any assurance that you're actually calculating what you want.
Even highly qualified domain experts (eg in derivatives trading) will end up building utter nonsense in Excel, and then use it to trade millions of dollars worth of exotics. Whenever they need something fixed, it takes an enormous effort to trace through all the cells to make sure things are correct.