That seems to be a problem with the users not the program. It's like traders saying that this or that indicator doesn't work. What they mean is it doesn't work for them. Excel has allowed me to do many things that I don't have to buy a separate program for. Should I feel bad because I'm putting developers out of work?
So a real life case study. I just moved some assets to a private bank and the file that they send me is a slightly different format than the file i get from my broker. So i was able to use VBA code to parse the new file into the same format of the other broker to be uploaded to my SQL server. It's a travesty that I didn't have to hire three developers at 100/hour each and 2 weeks of their time to do what i was able to accomplish in 1 hour.
i run my entire vol book on VBA, SQL Server, Bloomberg and a bunch of excel spreadsheets. It's worked for me for the last 20 years: A built in user interface Easy to use plugins Easy to debug code EDIT: you can now use Python within Excel.
you are not going to put developers out of work, quite the opposite. Excel has generated an immense amount of work for developers. Mostly trying to fix the shit that users have created. Most of my contracts were like that. My rant is not about the person, is about the software. I know I am alone against a legion of dinasours using Excel. If we were on another forum replies would be a lot different. But here the demographic is biased towards discretionary traders, so it is expected that you guys like Excel. You guys also like Python for trading , so there it is. I can't do anything about that. I am barking at the wrong tree.