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.
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.