[beachy]

I think of spreadsheets as like q-tips. Apparently the one thing that the manufacturers of q-tips tell you not to do is to stick them in your orifices. Yet the number one actual use of q-tips is people cleaning gunk from their ears.

People build the most insane, unmaintainable, insecure messes using spreadsheets - because they can.

[F_J_H]

But they can also build a lot of really useful things too, and many do, and create a ton of value.

The same can be said for any programming language/tool. Reminds me of this quote attributed to Doug Gwyn:

"Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things."

[losteverything]

And you can FAST. What else is there for quick and dirty stuff????

[goatlover]

iPython or Jupyter Notebooks, where you can whip up R, Julia, or other code in your browser, interspersed with markdown, charts and formulas.

[gglitch]

Emacs

[peatmoss]

I like to use org-tables for my spreadsheets:-D

I'm joking... mostly. That said, I really have used elisp functions on an org-tbl in anger before.

[sedachv]

There is also ses-mode (Simple Emacs Spreadsheet) that started shipping with Emacs since version 22.