[YurgenJurgensen]

Spreadsheets are one of the ugliest pieces of software that we use. Pretty much all of the paradigms spreadsheets enforce would be considered abhorrent in any other context. Excel needs five hundred megabytes of memory just to load a blank sheet. Vendor lock-in is just tolerated as a fact of life, as is the lack of a real way to integrate with version control, and a lack of human-readable source files. If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”, you would fire him on the spot, but that’s basically normal for an Excel sheet. There is not an ounce of elegance in MS Excel, and trying to integrate with PowerApps, PowerAutomate or PowerBI only makes things worse.

[hyperbrainer]

> If an engineer came to you and said “So for this project, I put all the code, input data, output data and comments scattered about one big two-dimensional array with no type safety, no portability, no scalability, no security, no variable names, no code re-use, no unit tests, no integration tests, no abstractions and no error handling”

So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?

[YurgenJurgensen]

There are people who start new projects in MATLAB in 2025 for reasons other than ‘our expensive bespoke libraries only support MATLAB and it’d cost millions to rewrite them’?

[hyperbrainer]

There is also all the helpful work that Mathworks does such as Simulink ... Also, consider that MATLAB works much more like how one would write on paper (including 1-indexing) and is what people are used to at this point.