I had a situation in a certain business field where the calculations the customer designed and implemented in a spreadsheet changed so regularly that implementing them in code was unworkable because by the time the code was out if was both late and outdated. I designed[0] a solution that recursively parsed and resolved the formulas from a list of input and output cells, built an AST out of it and transpiled it to actual code or bytecode. The prototype worked beautifully and made the result diffable, extendable with, and easily embeddable within real code. My then boss found the solution useless and NASA-class, outright rejected it, and had another team just spin up some Excel, calling it with OLE or whatever and called it a day, which had abysmal performance, reliability, and runtime cost (as in $$) which ended up killing the deal with the now irate customer.

[0] Actually since I had the idea waaaay before the business need and project, I had a personal MIT-licensed clean room toy implementation of it sleeping somewhere on my hard drive and used that for the business prototype.

Nice work! Would you consider publishing that on GitHub?

Thank you! That's the plan since the onset as soon as I have some time to turn this into not a glorious hack that basically only runs on my machine. Just the Excel and OpenDocument formula parser (using PEG via treetop in Ruby, can't recall what I used for Go, got a Python thing too) could be very useful to some already.

Honestly even as a horrible hack that only runs on your machine, I think I’d be interested in seeing it. PM me and I’d be happy to help make it not-so-hacky. I say this as someone who has plenty of projects in the “drafts” bin that often just needed a conspirator to have a reason to push things over the line.

I'm not sure I completely compel with your idea.

The reason is, I don't think there is a single website out there, which couldn't be described in a spreadsheet.

What I suggest though, is take a look at this, and throw your companies sheet at it in a 30 minute hack session. If this proves unfruitful, I'd be happy to hear all about it.

Spreadsheets are a terrible way to make web-sites, though.

One of the bits I agree about, is that we should be very wary that we, developers, don't get replaced by one.

> One of the bits I agree about, is that we should be very wary that we, developers, don't get replaced by one.

Friendly reminder that this is literally the whole point of the job. Automation. Making people stop doing tasks that can be done by machines - which often means replacing people with code. Sometimes even ourselves.

Yeah, I know:

    Spreadsheets > Web.

Abuse or not. It is always great if we can re-exploit the value of thousands of existing/legacy Excel files.

This, exactly. Spreadsheets have received enough abuse already.

> I think it's a terrible idea to abuse spreadsheets like this.

It currently maintains millions of business software jobs.

Telemarketing also maintains millions of jobs. Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to keep around.

> Doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to keep around.

Well, too bad the smart guys in Silicon Valley are busy perfecting their yak shaving, otherwise I'm sure they would have found the holy grail of business software that us foolish dark matter programmers have failed to deliver on for several decades in no time.

That explains a lot.