Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight.

I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about 60 seconds on a DEC 5000 workstation. But my numbers did not match the spreadsheet results, and finding out why was an interesting process.

I then encountered small, remote offices of big international firms -- usually real-estate, insurance companies -- that had limited local IT support. It was Excel macros all the way down.

And then a large biotech firm, where it took KPMG analysts a few months to determine that our entire business relied upon this one guy's spreadsheet.

So yeah.

But:

Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with? Alexa queries?

I have preferences other than Python, but mostly I csn read code written by the scientists who wrote them. They may be abominations, like global state variables and magic numbers, but they are readable.

Is Python any reason to hope for a better world?

(Hmm. Off-topic, perhaps. Your story woke some memories of tough IT experiences.)

> Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with?

Ideally, excel with separated actual use cases, which the original app merges into one thing:

- data entry into tables

- auto-generated tables over some ranges (dates, counts)

- constants / described values (they end up on a side, sometimes in a named cell if you're lucky)

- presentation/report layer

I think Access did some good things, but is too close to be database to be comfortable. BI to is great for the last part, but it's a separate/expensive product.

Yes, I too have seen those spreadsheets, but it's not Excel that's at fault, it's the users. I've taken XLS behemoths and trimmed them down to a fraction of their size and optimised sheets that ran overnight, to recalculate in seconds. I get what you're saying about Excel giving too much power in incapable hands, but I feel, for certain use cases, OO is too little power in even the most capable hands.

I keep saying this to my friends: I dream of the day when people exchange SQLite files instead of XLS(X), and Excel, and the like, are just an interface to that database. This way you get data integrity (Excel randomly truncating digits or converting numbers to scientific notation is the bane of my existence), data present in raw form, and being interface/view layer agnostic.