I stumbled across a great talk from Dylan Beattie about legacy code. It is a pre-pandemic talk, but it opens up with a great song and talks about legacy code differently than what we usually do.
There is a lot of great material and food for thought in this video, but I would like to turn your attention to minute 26, where Dylan talks about Excel and how the world runs on it.
He says that a lot of things are actually built on top of Excel because it is essentially a functional language of sorts. The software developed on top of Excel is also the software that is NOT written by professional programmers and software engineers. Yet, it is prevalent in modern society.
Don’t get me wrong. I am in favor of Excel. Love the tool and what Microsoft has done with it. It is so flexible that it can be used with almost all programming environments – from the built-in VBA (I know, ancient history), to Python or C#. We’ve done our share of Excel programming back in a day, e.g. designed measurement systems based on it: A framework for developing measurement systems and its industrial evaluation – ScienceDirect
I agree, the tool is not perfect, but it is installed on ALL office computers and can be executed by anybody. Just open up the file and run it. That’s why we chose it for the measurement systems. Well, at least until we had to do a big rewrite and go to SQL, dashboards, etc…
As I said – history.
