the critique of spreadsheets was lacking in my opinion. Not being able to see the of formulas is just a mode switch away or you can even implement your own checks like highlighting cells that aren't formulas but should be. It's kind of the same as code that is syntactically correct but wrong. I actually think spreadsheets are fantastic programming environment, total immersion in the results and instant feedback. The alternative proposed (by introducing another layer) seemed..... unconvincing and cumbersome. There's almost no common types of computations that would be better done outside the spreadsheet itself, and for uncommon ones where you want to do something fancy, nearly all spreadsheets can be accessed by a vast array of tools and languages. Spreadsheets have survived all challengers including those that try to create extra layers on top
> Not being able to see the of formulas is just a mode switch away
"Show formulas" is fine if it's "=A1-B1" but for real work, formulas get long with lots of filters and look-ups etc. I break them across multiple lines just to read them. If I toggle visible formulas, I only see the first few characters of such formulas that fit in the data cells. Even if it did work, reading every cell when you have 1000s of rows just sucks for spotting errors caused by a fill down error or a cat on keyboard or something.
The only way I can be confident with a spreadsheet is to have a validation sheet that performs a bunch of error-checking. For serious stuff, I think you almost need to keep an entire duplicate of the data and recreate the results with a different process because it's just so hard to catch everything e.g. heartbreaking to open an old important spreadsheet and see a line of data got duplicated somehow. Spreadsheets are just so damn mutable. A keyboard shortcut with the wrong application in focus and who knows what damage you might have just done to a spreadsheet.
