For a number of reasons (some of them actually fairly substantial), spreadsheets are the only end-user programming tool that caught on and endured, so users will often choose them. It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to the standard problems of managing those, but the incubation period for many of them is long enough to catch a lot of non-practicioners unaware. I don’t think telling people to leave it to the professionals is the answer, for what it’s worth,—I just don’t see how we get from here to a world where one could interpolate between systems and end-user software more gracefully.
> It’s not even that they won’t need to find/hire/allocate programmers, it’s that using them doesn’t seem like a big deal at all.
I don't understand why it doesn't seem like a big deal, knowing the limitations of spreadsheets. The spreadsheet experts have to know that it will be spaghetti in a decade, right?
I still think the solution for unifying those is to use a database as a backend, with the spreadsheets merely being a frontend for that backend. It does require the people to come somewhat closer to the software, though. I don't know that software can reasonably work with the ill-defined schema of spreadsheets.
Of course, just because you told yourself you aren’t doing a software project doesn’t mean you’re not prone to the standard problems of managing those, but the incubation period for many of them is long enough to catch a lot of non-practicioners unaware. I don’t think telling people to leave it to the professionals is the answer, for what it’s worth,—I just don’t see how we get from here to a world where one could interpolate between systems and end-user software more gracefully.