On another note, it's interesting to observe that the problems spreadsheets have are the same problems that plague poorly designed software everywhere - lack of documentation, lack of testing, lack of input validation, among others.
The other problem is specific to Excel. It just loves to mangle your data! The problem is so bad that geneticists have renamed some genes to stop Excel reinterpreting them as dates.
I recently hit a bug where all data was being checked to see if it was a datetime, and python interpreted `st1` as September 1st of the current year.
It has one order in the U.S and a different one in most other countries.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/w...
If you have not seen a spreadsheet with say dedicated data input tabs, calculation tabs where you can see and audit the work being done, output tabs, revision notes, summary sheet you haven't seen a good spreadsheet.
Or if it does have this feature, no one knows how to access it
There's branching. There's Boolean operations. There's variables (cells, which is ultimately the point of the entire exercise). There's even a switch construct. There's even really simple web requests! All of these are of course functions. The only thing that's missing is function definitions (which can be done with VBA, but I excluded that specifically for the sake of this exercise).
It's not particularly pretty, but is usable by almost anyone, has good documentation, and a huge community of like-minded power users. As you mentioned, Excel doesn't have any of the constructs which help developers for other languages to avoid mistakes. The simple syntax, users which are not necessarily aware of good practices, and a lack of methods to implement such practices produces a perfect storm of factors to introduce bugs.
For what it’s good for, it’s great. I love it because you can do many things faster with it than anything else, and the immediate feedback and visual data flow aren’t matched in any language’s IDE I’ve seen. But like all systems, when they grow they need checks. Like the trope about when your code grows to too much complexity, you start needing static types.
I dislike PHP just as much as the next guy, but I am quite impressed with how Hack turned out. It's Facebook's improved PHP. See eg https://hacklang.org/
It's not that Hack is a good language in absolute terms. But I think it's about the best language they could have come up with when starting from PHP.
(For a better comparison instead of C++, but still in similar spirit to C++, perhaps take D.)