> I think this kind of Excel denigration comes up so often in software forums because we're usually called in to rescue a business when their Excel workflow gets completely unmanageable.
I my uninformed opinion it is because SOP (spreadsheet oriented programming) is as different from other paradigms as Forth is from Java. Decades of tribal fights have sort of culminated in a vague "all Software Engineering is Software Engineering" where most people understand that there are benefits even in the paradigms/languages they do not like.
In another world Excel would be just another one of those paradigms/languages but in this world it did not partecipate in the "Sotware Civil Wars" and so it was left out of the respectability plateau.
In short it is not that excel is bad but rather that the cultural link between it and what we usually call programming is very weak
I my uninformed opinion it is because SOP (spreadsheet oriented programming) is as different from other paradigms as Forth is from Java. Decades of tribal fights have sort of culminated in a vague "all Software Engineering is Software Engineering" where most people understand that there are benefits even in the paradigms/languages they do not like.
In another world Excel would be just another one of those paradigms/languages but in this world it did not partecipate in the "Sotware Civil Wars" and so it was left out of the respectability plateau.
In short it is not that excel is bad but rather that the cultural link between it and what we usually call programming is very weak