What do you mean by "the cli"? Garbage in/garbage out always applies, that's not what I'm talking about. The point is errors in the code doing the processing. If it's written in a language you can read and understand the entire thing. You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet.

>You cannot read and understand an entire spreadsheet.

Why wouldn't you?

Except if you mean the internal implementation (by MS). But nobody reads the implementation of Pandas or R either...

I'm not talking about reading the underlying implementation, although that is, of course, another advantage of Python and R. I'm talking about reading the project. What's your process for reading a spreadsheet? Reading every single cell?

That's a good point. In a block of 10,000 cells that should all have the same formula (offset by 1, say) how do you know that they all actually have that same formula? I'm not aware of a way to check that that doesn't involve writing custom VBA.

A spreadsheet doesn't offer you a linear story that you can read. It's a strange amalgamation of computation and program.