> horrifying and error-prone programming model, both hard to write and hard to reason about.
I don't remember where I read this, but I heard that the basic Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is written with office workers in mind first. That is, Word isn't written for authors, Excel isn't written for database managers/big data specialists, and PowerPoint isn't written for motivational speakers.
I think the idea of the basic Office Suite is that a user could grasp the basic functionality of the software without having to undergo any training. Second to that, tools and other functionality for those with specific needs (e.g. pseudo-database functionality, basic data visualization in Excel) could use the software where the project was small enough. Excel was given great programming features without a proper programming language to support it.
This isn't to say that these programs are not feature packed or bad. They're kitchen sinks that want to make everyone happy.
The problem is that they are too easy to use. As such Excel gets used for everything data related. Access would be a far better choice in many of the cases I have seen, but it just doesn't make any sense unless you have had some sort of introductory course on databases.
I don't remember where I read this, but I heard that the basic Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is written with office workers in mind first. That is, Word isn't written for authors, Excel isn't written for database managers/big data specialists, and PowerPoint isn't written for motivational speakers.
I think the idea of the basic Office Suite is that a user could grasp the basic functionality of the software without having to undergo any training. Second to that, tools and other functionality for those with specific needs (e.g. pseudo-database functionality, basic data visualization in Excel) could use the software where the project was small enough. Excel was given great programming features without a proper programming language to support it.
This isn't to say that these programs are not feature packed or bad. They're kitchen sinks that want to make everyone happy.