[ghaff]

The post is probably something of a straw man. I think the "hate" is mostly about spreadsheets being used as effectively hard to audit spaghetti code for for tasks that would be better coded in some Python or R.

I've probably never been a real spreadsheet power user (though I've had some pretty big ones). But they're hard to beat for any sort of semi-structured tracking.

I sometimes wonder if spreadsheets as we know them were sort of an inevitable outcome of personal computers. There were some alternative takes early on but they never took off. It's also sort of interesting to me that some other tools in the same general space like databases on PCs sort of withered away.

[pico303]

It is a straw man. Software engineers don't hate spreadsheets when they're used as spreadsheets, like this article describes. They hate the "spreadsheet as a database," particularly when they're asked to load those spreadsheets into a proper database or other system periodically. Spreadsheets are so easy to use for tabular data, and since technical and non-technical people alike can easily use them, it's a tempting data transmission protocol. But most non-engineering types aren't disciplined about the layout, or understand the intricacies of interpreting the data (e.g. putting labels into numeric columns, adding accidental spaces to the end or beginning of labels), leaving the engineers to constantly rewrite sometimes complex scripts to load new data in this month's "flavor" of spreadsheet.