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People here still don’t get it. It’s not that spreadsheet are great for non programmers, they are great for programmers too.

The combination of UI and live calculation engine is unique.

How long does it take to make a pivot table with conditional formatting in Python?

How long does it take to have input validation in JavaScript?

Sure maybe a couple hours. But it takes literally 2 seconds in Excel.

Couple Excel with a fonctional programming addin and you’ll beat a Python programmer on 90% of data oriented tasks you may want to do.



Hmm, I'm not sure about that! Formatting in Python, sure - because it's not designed for outputting colours and type face. But the popular Python package, Pandas, makes Excel-like tasks a breeze. I'll often help colleagues who can't code to do something with their data that is nothing more than a single "groupby" or "apply" expression in Python+Pandas.


Implementation time vs maintainability

I will spend a couple of hours to do a good job on something that will inevitably be in use and under continued development for many years.


On prototypes? Yes.

On code meant to be shipped and/or maintained? Not even close!


Why would this take two hours to do in python? Excel is a nightmare for production tasks.




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