Excel is the new BASIC

BASIC is a language that, to quote Rodney Dangerfield, gets no respect.

Some have quipped that "those whom the gods would destroy... they first teach BASIC".

COBOL may be disparaged, but only to a limited extent. People, deep down, know that COBOL is running many useful system. (Things like banking, airline reservations, and perhaps most importantly payroll.) COBOL does work, and we respect it.

BASIC, on the other hand, tried to be useful but never really made it. Despite Microsoft's attempt with its MBASIC product, Digital Research with its CBASIC compiler, Digital Equipment Corporation with its various implementations of BASIC, and others, BASIC was always second place to other programming languages. For microcomputers, those languages were assembly language, Pascal, and C.

(I'm limiting this to the interpreter BASIC, the precursor to Visual Basic. Microsoft's Visual Basic was capable and popular. It was used for many serious applications, some of which are probably still running today.)

BASIC's challenge was its design. It was a language for learning the concepts of programming, not building large, serious programs. The name itself confirms this: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

More than the name, the constructs of the programming language are geared for small programs. This is due to the purpose of BASIC (a better FORTRAN for casual users) and the timing of BASIC (the nascent "structured programming" movement had yet to prove itself).

Without the constructs structured programming ("while" loops and "if/then/else" statements), programmers must either build their programs with structured concepts made of smaller elements, or build unstructured programs. BASIC allows you to build structured programs, but provides no assistance. Worse, BASIC relies on GOTO to build most control flows.

In contrast, modern programming languages such as Java, C#, Python, and Ruby provide the constructs for structured programming and don't offer the GOTO statement.

The people who learned to program in BASIC (and I am one of them) learned to program poorly, and we have paid a heavy price for it.

But what does this have to do with Microsoft Excel?

Excel is the application taught to people for managing data. (Microsoft Word is suitable for documents, and Powerpoint is suitable for presentations, but Excel is *the* application for data. I suspect more people know and use Excel than all of the people using Word, Powerpoint, and Access.)

Excel offers the same undisciplined approach to applications. Spreadsheets contain data and formulas (and VBA macros, but I will ignore those for now).

One might argue that Excel is a spreadsheet, different from a programming language such as BASIC. Yet the differences are small. Excel, with its formulas alone, is a programming system if not a language.

The design of Excel (and other spreadsheets, going back to Visicalc) provides no support for structure or discipline. Formulas can collect data from anywhere in the spreadsheet. There is no GOTO keyword, but one can easily build a tangled mess.

Microsoft Excel is the new BASIC: useful, popular, and undisciplined. Worse than BASIC, since Excel is the premier tool for manipulating data. BASIC, for all of its flaws, was always second to some other language.

In one way, Excel is not as bad as BASIC. Formulas may collect data from any location in the spreadsheet, but they (for the most part) modify only their own contents. This provides a small amount of order to spreadsheet-programs.

We need a new paradigm for data management. Just as programming had its "structured programming" movement which lead to the use of constructs that improved the reliability and readability of programs, spreadsheets need a new approach to the organization of data and the types of formulas that can be used on that data.