The point was more one of "Excel is an IDE for a functional language." Doing large projects in Excel should take as much care / design / thought as large projects in Lisp (or any other language).
That Excel is everywhere and people often do simple things that grow large without having the discipline of managing the complexity that excel can become - that's where there's problems.
Rather if you say to someone with enough skill to get started "here's
python, good luck" you'll get similar results as "here's Excel, good luck." Just that you'll have an easier time persuading cooperate IT to install Excel on your machine compared to Python.
The point was more one of "Excel is an IDE for a functional language." Doing large projects in Excel should take as much care / design / thought as large projects in Lisp (or any other language).
That Excel is everywhere and people often do simple things that grow large without having the discipline of managing the complexity that excel can become - that's where there's problems.
Rather if you say to someone with enough skill to get started "here's python, good luck" you'll get similar results as "here's Excel, good luck." Just that you'll have an easier time persuading cooperate IT to install Excel on your machine compared to Python.