[tannhaeuser]

That's wrong in more than one way IMO.

While vi might be a code editor first and foremost, not all vi users are coders. There are copy writers, academic and literature, having a need for fast and focussed touch typing (George R. R. Martin comes to mind as prominent WordStar user). The entire point of SGML/XML/HTML markup is to be able to create rich text documents without binary formats and special editors; this is also the case with Wiki syntaxes like markdown, which have been around since long before John Gruber's original Markdown.PL and are directly supported as a shortref customisation in SGML, from 1986, BTW.

Conversely, even if you are a coder, classic spreadsheets are extremely useful for any type of ad-hoc reproducible calculation (such as for taxes or other personal or business finance stuff). You really should check out spreadsheets if you haven't already; the point is that you can cross-reference cell values and copy/paste with relative cell positions to create large calculation tables/matrices, then update base values and perform "what-if" analyses, etc. etc. Using cell formulas is more like a logical programming language environment. I've used it for all kinds of reports apart from financials (benchmarks, construction/project planning, even a Tic Tac Toe game in school out of boredom).

[executesorder66]

I don't disagree with your first paragraph, but I don't think it is relevant to what I was saying.

> Conversely, even if you are a coder, classic spreadsheets are extremely useful for any type of ad-hoc reproducible calculation

Again, I still feel like code is the ideal solution to "ad-hoc reproducible calculations"

> the point is that you can cross-reference cell values and copy/paste with relative cell positions to create large calculation tables/matrices, then update base values and perform "what-if" analyses, etc. etc.

I still don't see how you can't do that with code, nor what the spreadsheet is doing that code can't.

> I've used it for all kinds of reports apart from financials (benchmarks, construction/project planning, even a Tic Tac Toe game in school out of boredom).

Sure. It has been proven that excel is Turing complete. But I'd rather use a programming language (a tool that was literally designed for the purpose of writing code), than a clunky spreadsheet. Both can get the job done, I never denied that. But I still don't see the value that the spreadsheet brings over custom code written to solve the exact same problem.

[robenkleene]

I'd love to hear what specifically makes you call spreadsheets "clunky"? (Personally I find spreadsheets to be quite elegant, a table adapts easily to WIMP [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)]. E.g., in contrast to say the Bézier curve interface in Illustrator, which I wouldn't ask for explanation in being called clunky, because drawing curves does not adapt easily to WIMP for example.)

[pmelendez]

> Again, I still feel like code is the ideal solution to "ad-hoc reproducible calculations"

I am a developer and I do my personal budgeting on a spreadsheet. It was easier to setup and maintain, and follows my process better than the personal finance software I have used before. Could I have made a little program for this? Sure, but it would be time consuming and I have better projects to spend my time on.

[dmwilcox]

Let me tell you the story of how i came to love and use sc-im instead of my own solution.

Multi-country taxes are too much fun. Every dollar/GBP amount needs to be converted to the other currency for taxes in that country.

I originally did this in libre office but I got annoyed at it and wrote a markdown pipeline to produce PDFs for my accountants.

I would do data entry in CSV and wrote a CSV to markdown converter. Along the way I wrote a simple CSV formula language with just a couple of functions that would do column level operations e.g. =MUL(C, E) to multiply columns C and E.

This worked pretty well, and I could make a small directory of sorted markdown files to assemble, and a Makefile to transform the CSV+formula files to flat CSVs.

But CSV input was kind of annoying and my formula language wasn't easy to extend, or very nice. So I jumped at sc-im which can directly output markdown tables.

Anyway, I highly recommend sc-im, the .sc files are a fine replacement for my custom solution and I haven't looked back (and taxes are coming again soon!)