I agree 100% with that. And I suggest that LLMs make it much easier to “pull out” business calculations. Maybe into SQL with a custom Python script even :-).

For 41 years Excel has been the dominant way to mess with numbers in a grid. Google Sheets and Apple Numbers are really just me too players, albeit with their niches. LibreOffice struggles imo since its main claim is to be fully Excel compatible but there are so many ancient Excel sheets that fail in practice (VBScript?).

I think that there will continue to be a need for folks to mess with numbers in a grid … more between a super calculator and an interactive dataset. I could have chosen a DB vernacular for Omasheet - DuckDB does this for Polars - but that lacks some of the numeric purity of the sheet. So I have gone for the core Polars query model - closer to Arrow columnar data (parquet), streaming support, lowered calculations, lazy execution … but without the DB abstraction layer.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be around for a long time. For the average non-coder, it's probably the most logical way to structure a calculation.

Maybe a controversial take, but IMO Except is the most successful and most popular GUI framework in history. The Internet could die today, and tomorrow the world would go back to spreadsheet programs for business tasks.

"random business calculations in random cells" is what a lot of quick business stuff lives on, putting a few formulas instead of an entire application is what you need (not even AI's can keep up with that once you're used to it).

The danger as always, is when it becomes the entrenched business process, and as you say, being able to automatically pull out the logic when formalizing it is the win.