Agreed that Excel is real programming and that data belongs in a database - so why not give it a real programming language with a sufficiently expressive query language?<p>This was my reasoning behind a spreadsheet prototype backed by kdb+ and the q language (which is a superset of SQL): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;srpeck&#x2F;kxl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;srpeck&#x2F;kxl</a><p>There is value in this simple combination, but tons of work required to gain feature parity and market share from Excel. I think the latter is why research in this space is lacking.