[brfox]

I totally agree. I just wonder if there is some way to take that open space, visual programming which so many people do with Excel and make it more robust. Well, actually, lots of people are working on making a better spreadsheet or putting the table data into a database and making interactive plots, so maybe that's not the angle here. Maybe we can figure out how to make our IDEs more Excel-like in some ways. Not for us regular programmers, but for people who'd like to do serious programming in their subject/domain of expertise but don't want to just do it in Excel with VB.

[flukus]

For things excel is used for I find a few unix tools and piping between them can achieve a similar affect yet still be maintainable, debuggable and repeatable. In lieu of convincing the masses to work this way, I wonder if visual tools could take the best parts? Instead of updating cells on sheets (global variables), have a UI that allows users to break down it down into a series of steps with an input and an output, much like a makefile. Then it would be possible to step through the script, inspect the input and output for each step and view the final result.