Gregory's ServerI want to love Forth and Lisp and Perl and Go and I sort of want to know Rust and Haskell and OCaml and Elixir, but really, the most important electronic computing platform for the largest number people is … spreadsheets.
Formulas and graphs turn these into the multifunctional tool that spread from accounting specialists to financial reporting to project managers planning to household budgets to birthday and wedding guest lists.
If you think about it, spreadsheets for the masses succeeded where Emacs failed. Spreadsheets allow you to build the tools you need. And sure, as a programming professional I have heard my share of horror stories: salary distributions and bonus programs, airport light systems, and many other things that should have used relational databases and REST services and whatever. But people know spreadsheets and use them to solve their problems.
Spreadsheets are underappreciated. Certainly they are underappreciated by programmers, I think.
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I remember seeing somebody getting Lotus 1-2-3 resurrected somehow. And I know there is a spreadsheet implementation for Emacs. But I’ve not tried either.
For more mundane tasks I’d say Libre Calc would be good enough – and I hardly use it, either. I think my main issue is that I’d like a command line spreadsheet thing that’s not very functional but a bit like bc or dc or orpie – a thing that starts up super quick, let’s me keep state, and all that.