I would say people love spreadsheets (Excel just happened to be a particularly well done implementation of a spreadsheet when the GUI became the most popular desktop platform) because:
a) Easy visual data entry - everyone understands a table of data.
b) Non-procedural programming model.
c) Simple analysis tools (batteries included): charts and pivot tables.
There just has not been much imagination applied to improving on this model - there are great gobs of ground for innovation for someone willing to take a stab.
1) Make spreadsheets "functional" - i.e., allow a whole spreadsheet model to be used as a function definition (I was amazed when I first learned spreadsheets and found they lacked this capability).
2) Make it easier to sling large data sets around - and especially share and work with dataset repositories.
3) Better hooks for developers to integrate spreadsheets with more advanced functionality and features. There is too much locked up in the spreadsheet as a monolithic application. I can publish my Python program easily - why can't I do the same for an application developer in "spreadsheet language"?
There has been relatively little thinking about how to organize and manage collections of spreadsheets and models. Most people still deal with one spreadsheet at a time; it's its own little island - largely cut off from the rest of the world. In the era of cloud infrastructure and hosted data, why aren't there better systems in place to manage data and models in the aggregate? What if you married the best of GitHub and Excel together, for example?
I would say people love spreadsheets (Excel just happened to be a particularly well done implementation of a spreadsheet when the GUI became the most popular desktop platform) because:
a) Easy visual data entry - everyone understands a table of data.
b) Non-procedural programming model.
c) Simple analysis tools (batteries included): charts and pivot tables.
There just has not been much imagination applied to improving on this model - there are great gobs of ground for innovation for someone willing to take a stab.
1) Make spreadsheets "functional" - i.e., allow a whole spreadsheet model to be used as a function definition (I was amazed when I first learned spreadsheets and found they lacked this capability).
2) Make it easier to sling large data sets around - and especially share and work with dataset repositories.
3) Better hooks for developers to integrate spreadsheets with more advanced functionality and features. There is too much locked up in the spreadsheet as a monolithic application. I can publish my Python program easily - why can't I do the same for an application developer in "spreadsheet language"?
There has been relatively little thinking about how to organize and manage collections of spreadsheets and models. Most people still deal with one spreadsheet at a time; it's its own little island - largely cut off from the rest of the world. In the era of cloud infrastructure and hosted data, why aren't there better systems in place to manage data and models in the aggregate? What if you married the best of GitHub and Excel together, for example?