The OG Low-Code Platform
September 10, 2025
SPREADSHEETS are the de facto most popular programming environment ever created. Purchase decisions for entire families of personal computers have been made solely on the availability (or lack thereof) of a particular spreadsheet application. There is arguably more structured data stored in spreadsheets than in any other support ever invented by mankind. And it is frankly inconceivable to imagine a modern computing platform, either on the desktop or mobile, without any sort of spreadsheet software available for it.
Of late, there has been a great deal of disparagement of Vibe Coding. The term has become almost amorphously useless for describing anything specific, but in broad terms now, it’s come to mean any generation of code by a large language model, particularly when folks use that without careful perusal of the code.
When we think of software and code, particularly professional software developers will think of professionally developed code deployed for widespread use.
But perhaps the majority of the code ever developed has not been developed by professional software engineers and is not in widespread use.
A lot of that software is actually spreadsheets which run processes and workflows and entire businesses in small, medium, and even large organisations.
This is a fascinating look at the history of spreadsheets from the 1960s to today. Originating as a tool for accountants to use in finance, it’s extraordinary the uses of that technology have been put to.
But will vibe coding reduce this reliance on spreadsheets?
