It's always fun to look down on the likes of Excel and PHP etc. Of course, we should try to learn, too.
Excel for all its faults is easy for beginners to pick up. Semi-technical people can quickly hack together a bug-ridden prototype of their ideas. In most companies the alternative is not well-written software, but spending countless meetings to get IT to spend millions to provide a bug-ridden prototype in a few years time.
One of the main problems with Excel as I can see it is that it is effectively a write-only language. Auditing an Excel sheet is famously almost impossible. And that's before you add VBA in the mix.
Since I mentioned PHP: one of the best things I can say about the language and its ecosystem is that they made it really easy to add a 'web-counter' to your otherwise late 90s static html-only page on shared hosting. You begin with a web-counter, and then just keep on copy-and-pasting.. Haskell is not nearly that easy to pick up, even if you are prepared to do it badly.
Excel for all its faults is easy for beginners to pick up. Semi-technical people can quickly hack together a bug-ridden prototype of their ideas. In most companies the alternative is not well-written software, but spending countless meetings to get IT to spend millions to provide a bug-ridden prototype in a few years time.
One of the main problems with Excel as I can see it is that it is effectively a write-only language. Auditing an Excel sheet is famously almost impossible. And that's before you add VBA in the mix.
Since I mentioned PHP: one of the best things I can say about the language and its ecosystem is that they made it really easy to add a 'web-counter' to your otherwise late 90s static html-only page on shared hosting. You begin with a web-counter, and then just keep on copy-and-pasting.. Haskell is not nearly that easy to pick up, even if you are prepared to do it badly.