[cm2187]

In fact a lot could be said of the millions of ways to shoot oneself in the foot with programming languages. Excel being visual (the formula is evaluated/tested immediatly after being entered), I'd argue a diligent user will make less mistakes with Excel than while coding.

[ethan_g]

This is true for small spreadsheets, and one reason why I love Excel for quick analyses. Debugging is nearly instant because you see the results as you go along. But it doesn't scale very well.

--If you want to re-use a formula, you basically have to copy-paste it. Generally there isn't much modularity. Programmers are well aware of the dangers of this.

--It's also not a friendly platform for writing regression tests (possible with VB, but who does that?).

--The two-dimensional nature of the spreadsheets and lack of loops means you often need to do hacky stuff to emulate multidimensional arrays or loops. Easy to make mistakes here.

[KMag]

> Excel being visual (the formula is evaluated/tested immediatly after being entered)

We generally call this "interactive" and not "visual", in order to avoid confusion with graphical programming languages.

I agree that being interactive probably helps rapid iteration, debugging, and experimentation. However, Excel could still be interactive without being so fast and loose with types, accurate display of numbers, and many of the other faults others have pointed out.

Also, if you're trying to make some subtle point about the reduced severity of mistakes, you mean "lesser" rather than "less", otherwise you mean "fewer". https://duckduckgo.com/?q=less+vs+fewer