Spreadsheets might be the best possible tool and represents an inflection point where any improvements detract from other dimensions. So it’s like the Pareto frontier for software/data projects.

I’ve been waiting years for someone to solve this as there are serious flaws that I’d like fixed.

But all the “improvements” end up breaking other things. For example, airtable seems cool but its cost makes it non-comparable (eg, email a spreadsheet to a million people, a million can “fork” try pricing that with airtable; save a spreadsheet to disk, archive forever, etc).

I think that everyone can program, but few will be professional programmers. And many of the fixes for Excel are assuming that all people who program should act like professional programmers. And this isn’t possible or likely.

What about strongly-typed spreadsheets? I’d kill for a strongly-typed spreadsheet. So many literal million-dollar mistakes are caused by typing (not “typing”) errors in spreadsheets, and Excel makes it easy to do the wrong thing.

Ad-hoc SQL workday be nice too. PowerQuery is nice (great, even) but it doesn’t feel like it’s a part of Excel - and while it’s language is better than SQL, I really don’t want to have to learn a whole new syntax to express the same simple ideas.

Isn't Airtable effectively a strongly-typed spreadsheet? It forces you to chose the 'field type' for everything.

Airtable is strongly typed in the fields of the tables, but the expression language is not. It is my conclusion based on researching Airtable, that the decision to have well typed tables is so that relational operations work nicely, and so that they can implement interfaces on top of these tables easily, such as calendars and work planning things etc. I don’t think that there is an underlying motivation to fix the ill-type code of the world, so to speak. Any non-trivial code work is done in JavaScript, anyway.

JavaScript is strongly-typed though, it just lacks a way to declare types. One can easily restrict types in script code (using `typeof` for primitives and `instanceof` for object prototypes).

People refer to it as "weakly-typed" because most (but not all) of the built-in types have implicit conversions to other types; and many of which are non-obvious: https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs