Excel is used HEAVILY at all levels of business for large, complex, and important things. I'm curious what this right tool is that they should be using instead.
What this lets you do is in Python build networks of computations then change one value and it will cascade through the rest of your model, exactly like you do in Excel, but in actual code that can easily be versioned, reused, etc.
Yes, it's true Excel is used for a lot of big important things, but I'd agree with GP it's not very good at them. Moreover, I think most people who use Excel for big important things, would agree it's not good for it--they get stuck in that situation when a small spreadsheet grows big over the years. Lack of version control, limited modularity, and no ability to unit test make large spreadsheets error-prone, and Excel tends to barf on you when you push it too hard (seems to be a number of crash bugs and performance bugs that never get fixed).
Excel is incredibly productive for quick analysis and making charts. But it's really not a development platform and it's really not for heavy lifting.
The primary reason Java (and other programming languages) aren't, and won't be used instead of Excel is that Excel is interactive. About the closest you can get to that with a programming language is Lisp, but it's still half-way there compared to a spreadsheet, when you can see the data all the time as it is placed and updated.
The second big reason is that Excel just works, and all programming languages usually require installing tons of bullshit - editors, toolchains, whatever - to be able to work somewhat conveniently in them, and the moment any link in the bullshit chain crashes, you're SOL if you're not a developer. Yeah, we sometimes underestimate just how much minutiae knowledge we have that allows us to fix random problems in our tools without even thinking for a second about it.
So maybe Excel is unfit for purpose, but it's still the most fit for purpose tool available.
> About the closest you can get to that with a programming language is Lisp, but it's still half-way there compared to a spreadsheet, when you can see the data all the time as it is placed and updated.
I think that Kenny Tilton's Cells was an attempt to get that sort of interactive update functionality in Lisp. I was never able to figure it out though.
What this lets you do is in Python build networks of computations then change one value and it will cascade through the rest of your model, exactly like you do in Excel, but in actual code that can easily be versioned, reused, etc.