Spreadsheets are the dominant end-user-programmable tool in existence. Much of what people user them for is horrifying to programmers who know better.
But if spreadsheets actually did the "right" thing, they would never have been so widely adopted in the first place. That's an unprovable assertion on my part, but I strongly suspect it's true. I think it's a clear case of Worse is Better[0].
But if spreadsheets actually did the "right" thing, they would never have been so widely adopted in the first place.
I don't think spreadsheets are widely adopted because they do the wrong thing, I think they are widely adopted because they provide UI affordances that systems that do the Right Thing didn't at the time that spreadsheets became widely adopted, and, since then, IT departments have imposed lockdown requirements which prevent anything programmable from being accessible to end-users except spreadsheets, because spreadsheets were so widely adopted before that lockdown began and end users simply refuse to give them up.
Its not, IMO, a worse-is-better situation, its simply better-is-better (in terms of UI affordances at the time of wide adoption) combined with non-technical, socially-imposed constraints which have locked the dominance in place by preventing any competition in the end-user accessible programming space.
Thats because most tools that strongly focus on correctness are also designed to not allow the user to proceed despite the detected errors.
The real right thing to do there is to give the user a warning: visually mark the field as potentially tainted, but assume the user knows what they're doing and give them a result anyway. Let them decide how much they care about correctness in that particular case.
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I get it, I really do. But I'm a programmer.
Spreadsheets are the dominant end-user-programmable tool in existence. Much of what people user them for is horrifying to programmers who know better.
But if spreadsheets actually did the "right" thing, they would never have been so widely adopted in the first place. That's an unprovable assertion on my part, but I strongly suspect it's true. I think it's a clear case of Worse is Better[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
I don't think spreadsheets are widely adopted because they do the wrong thing, I think they are widely adopted because they provide UI affordances that systems that do the Right Thing didn't at the time that spreadsheets became widely adopted, and, since then, IT departments have imposed lockdown requirements which prevent anything programmable from being accessible to end-users except spreadsheets, because spreadsheets were so widely adopted before that lockdown began and end users simply refuse to give them up.
Its not, IMO, a worse-is-better situation, its simply better-is-better (in terms of UI affordances at the time of wide adoption) combined with non-technical, socially-imposed constraints which have locked the dominance in place by preventing any competition in the end-user accessible programming space.
Thats because most tools that strongly focus on correctness are also designed to not allow the user to proceed despite the detected errors.
The real right thing to do there is to give the user a warning: visually mark the field as potentially tainted, but assume the user knows what they're doing and give them a result anyway. Let them decide how much they care about correctness in that particular case.