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by bombcar 1003 days ago
Almost everyone who uses python would say they're programming (or 'scripting') - but very few people who do very similar things in Excel would say the same.

Excel is like Factorio or Minecraft, you end up "automating" things you were doing by hand and it doesn't "feel" programatic, and you can very easily "peek and poke" the memory of the "program" as you go along.

Hypercard (and maybe Flash, I never used either) might be somewhere in-between, but closer to Excel.

Powerpoint is almost programmable, but nobody uses it that way.

(There's a similar disjuncture amongst the Linux/Mac users where they will write bash/zsh scripts but not count it as programming.)

1 comments

> you end up "automating" things you were doing by hand and it doesn't "feel" programatic, and you can very easily "peek and poke" the memory of the "program" as you go along.

I don't see how that's different from mucking around with Python locally on your own machine?