I agree with this but as a very visual thinker I'm always a little conflicted. A small formula field can take an aeroplane cockpit worth of graphic interface and compress it down to a tiny box. But try to do too much with the formula field and it can easily get too complicated in its own right.

I recently got a look at a how a team at a Fortune 500 company was using Excel. They’re using it as at full custom complex app + database that any user can modify. What seemed remarkable to me is how poorly spreadsheets are currently designed for this use while also being better designed for this use than perhaps any other option. I used to be surprised when I heard about companies running major internal app off spreadsheets. Now I’m surprised everything doesn’t already run off something very much like them.

All the Twitter thread is very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

What I find most shocking about Excel is how often you conceptually have regions with the "same" formula (just references varying) with very little help from the tool to maintain the integrity of this "formula."

An earlier thread I started asked why people thought so little progress has been made in “future of coding” style dev tools. After seeing how spreadsheets are being used, I’m starting to think the answer is that spreadsheets have been a good enough solution to saturate this part of the dev ecosystem and that’s made for relatively few opportunities in the space.

I'm not sure how big a "part of the dev ecosystem" that spreadsheets consume... A lot of the "run your business" cases, definitely, but not that much in terms of how humans can use computers.

Do you think there are more commercial apps than apps made within spreadsheets?

I couldn't say... I guess I'm thinking more of the mind-share of what people could think up and want to build. Like graphics, for instance — a lot of great advances there, a lot of FoC projects. Or big data / data analysis. As many different areas as there are, there should be FoC approaches and innovations. Feels like spreadsheets would mostly only encroach and suck up oxygen of business applications — but even there, projects like Coda succeed (or at least survive in the ecosystem). In fact, I'm of the mind that spreadsheets haven't even started to soak up the mind-share that they should. So many possibilities that haven't even been explored. https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1595371343178500

Wouldn't the super complex excel programs be using macros and are more visual basic than excel at that point?