I think you misunderstood my point somewhat. I'm not saying that Excel solved the version control problem - far from it. Manual version control by emailing copies of spreadsheets was identified as a major cause of errors in various studies.
My point is that for end-user programming to work we need version control, deployment, packaging etc to scale down as well as up. The software industry has a tendency to fetishize scaling up and ignore scaling down.
Experienced professional programmers still struggle with git in their day-to-day workflow (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/bend/ppig2014/13Church-Soderbe...). The average end-user has no chance. Even if the underlying data model is something like git, the experience for the user needs to be more like undo-tree or etherpad.
Excel smooths the learning curve for calculation/simulation - you can get started by just putting in some numbers and learning a few basic functions. If that's all you need, that's all you have to learn. I want to see the same pay-as-you-go approach for all our tools.
My point is that for end-user programming to work we need version control, deployment, packaging etc to scale down as well as up. The software industry has a tendency to fetishize scaling up and ignore scaling down.
Experienced professional programmers still struggle with git in their day-to-day workflow (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/bend/ppig2014/13Church-Soderbe...). The average end-user has no chance. Even if the underlying data model is something like git, the experience for the user needs to be more like undo-tree or etherpad.
Excel smooths the learning curve for calculation/simulation - you can get started by just putting in some numbers and learning a few basic functions. If that's all you need, that's all you have to learn. I want to see the same pay-as-you-go approach for all our tools.