I'm not a computer scientist, but I think that spreadsheets were possibly ahead of their time in a couple ways:
1. They let novices build fairly effective user interfaces, just by entering headers for rows and columns.
2. If I understand what "data flow" programming is (based on using LabVIEW), then the formula cells in spreadsheets are such a thing. Each formula is recomputed whenever its inputs change. That creates an incredibly quick testing cycles. Displaying intermediate results by necessity creates a built in debugger.
In addition, the lack of "complete" programming features, such as loops, may make spreadsheets less forbidding for novices to create and debug.
If these things are, as I suspect, compelling enough on their own, then like you say, the rest of the stuff in the latest Excel would just be icing on the cake -- not that I'd give up any of it.
1) spreadsheets are a purely functional programming language. When you point this out to management users of it (after explaining what it is), they wouldn't want to live without it.
So in reality the most widely used programming language in the world, is a purely functional one.
2) they are NOT turing complete (assuming you stay away from VBScript)
Of course, they're worse than BASIC when it comes to naming things, which is what everyone here is complaining about. But these are major advantages, to be fair. The only thing that comes even vaguely close to how spreadsheets work are the IPython notebooks.
It looks like it uses one row per step. Excel supports finite rows, and hence this does not prove that Excel is Turing complete. A program like while(true); will eventually run out of rows and terminate.
Re. naming things, In the original BASIC, variable names were also quite limited. A-Z, A[0-9]-Z[0-9], which is actually an even more limited space than most spreadsheets which allow for something like [A-Z]{1,4},[0-9]{1,4} at least.
You could also argue that spreadsheets are kind of homoiconic, since code and data occupy the same structure. But that's a bit of a stretch.
1. They let novices build fairly effective user interfaces, just by entering headers for rows and columns.
2. If I understand what "data flow" programming is (based on using LabVIEW), then the formula cells in spreadsheets are such a thing. Each formula is recomputed whenever its inputs change. That creates an incredibly quick testing cycles. Displaying intermediate results by necessity creates a built in debugger.
In addition, the lack of "complete" programming features, such as loops, may make spreadsheets less forbidding for novices to create and debug.
If these things are, as I suspect, compelling enough on their own, then like you say, the rest of the stuff in the latest Excel would just be icing on the cake -- not that I'd give up any of it.