Excel is a local optimum - a hill
on the way up the mountain.
Yes, scratch and excel are good solutions for the issue of "it takes years to become software literate and I have six week evening classes to fit it in, what shall i teach"
Not everyone who drives a car needs to be able to rebuild the engine.
Not everyone who writes a video game needs to write the physics engine.
Not everyone who needs to analyze a dataset needs to write SQL.
Abstractions and tools exist at levels that provide value to people solving problems. The more accessible the tools are, the wider the net of people that can leverage them.
A minority of voices can loudly yell in a corner about how everyone needs to use modal editors and write their own assembly while the rest of the world moves on and ignores them.
I think saying Excel & co are just shortcuts to do the same thing worse, is a bit uncharitable. I have very little experience with spreadsheets and a fair bit of experience with imperative programming (I guess declarative too from SQL, which is actually quite transferable to gSheets formulas).
I was sorting out a spreadsheet which I could use to keep track of income events and display information on taxes at different brackets, running totals for income & tax, capital gains events, and spent about 3-4 hours working on it, even though the formulas were all new to me.
The same thing would have taken me far longer as a python program.
Spreadsheets are really just the perfect way to operate on tabular data and display tabular data that has been transformed through a cascading series of transformation functions. I don't think it's possible to do this as efficiently through imperative programming.
Excel is a local optimum - a hill on the way up the mountain.
Yes, scratch and excel are good solutions for the issue of "it takes years to become software literate and I have six week evening classes to fit it in, what shall i teach"
but that's the answer to the wrong question.