[ken]

Indeed -- as long as the problem domain is "strings and numbers", and doesn't require any I/O. That's a pretty small fraction of the things I actually need to do. What would his 7-line shell script look like in Excel?

The great thing about functional languages is they have no side-effects. The lousy thing about functional languages is they have no side-effects. :-)

[justincormack]

Thats true, but people use other worksheets as kind of declarative IO areas (that they print). And Google Docs is a big improvement as your spreadsheets get URLs and so enter into the outside world.