N=1 software and the unreasonable effectiveness of Excel
maxrumpf.comSimon Peyton Jones said interesting things about Excel and FP.
What we dislike about Excel is summed up in the memes. "No, that number is not a date" problems are just inexcusable.
But in terms of computing power, it's awesome.
My personal preference is a sweet spot to use Python with xlsxwriter or openpyxl to read (and write) worksheets where I can't do it inside Excel due to my lack of competency. Then I can produce Excel charts (even directed by the Python) which are indistinguishable from what others do, in style terms. I guess if somebody writes a graphics output engine which is 1:1 congruent with data uplift to Powepoint, I'd stop.
(the thing I find hardest is to select cell contents into a new array, not to compute a map/reduce over them but simply to populate a table in a new specified location as an XFILTER over some other nominated cells. COUNTIF is fine. But thats a map/reduce solution. I want the literal subset under some criteria, so I can do other things with it, and I want to see it not just have it a computed state off-workbook. The evidence is strong you have to write VBSCRIPT solutions to iterate, and none of them are well documented that I can find)
Excel is awful in almost every way, but I just wish more software was as customizable.
I can get (even more) customization by using pandas etc., but it's usually much slower and you get much less of an intuition about the data.