Excel on Windows was the only tool available, outside of offering sacrifices to the high priesthood of IT.

It is a supremely elegant tool capable of deep data integration and extraordinary analysis, if you approach it with an engineer’s mindset.

This was during the time when they started introducing lambda and related functions. Nowadays, Excel is even more of a superpower.

Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

This seems like something I'd expect to already exist in Excel, but the way it's being presented makes it sound like they want to murder Excel.

Would anyone be shocked to find out that I've been smuggling JSON in spreadsheets for a long long time and regret nothing?

Anyway, adding an extra dimension on a 2-dimensional spreadsheet (rows, columns, and now depth)? Good luck with that.

(1) OK it breaks for all usernames, I guess because it's Microslop...