I'm the co-founder of Calcapp, an app designer for the spreadsheet crowd which uses Excel-like formulas. I've had hundreds of conversations with potential users and I have a radically different view of what people find problematic with spreadsheets than I did at the outset. I thought that people would be clamoring for version control, unit tests, the ability to define custom functions and to prevent users from tampering with the formulas and data. Instead, people are mostly looking to craft better user interfaces with great usability on mobile and to get into app stores.
I've spent years building calculator apps for healthcare use, where the certification process essentially requires apps to come with unit tests, so I'm definitely biased by my past experience. I'm still somewhat surprised that more people aren't frustrated that spreadsheets make it so hard to build robust software.
I see their point, but this is exactly what I'm trying every day to prevent at work (at least to a certain degree). Way too many people use complex spreadsheets for business critical tasks where other tools are better suited.
If the concept of shareable libraries of function sheets become a reality, we're likely to end up in a scenario where corporate IT maintains one software suite, while the end-users supposed to use that suite ends up using a bunch of spreadsheets instead, but with no quality control and a backup/VCS resembling <filename>.backup.xlsx, <filename>.working.xlsx, <filename> (copy).xlsx, etc....
And I have seen even more often IT systems that take years to build, are narrowy designed for a very specific purpose, and if anything changes, users end up reverting to spreadsheets to make up for the shortcomings of a system that would take many months, lobbying to management (who will always say it's not the right time to spend money on IT), inexplicably high budgets, etc.
Even very large corporations would grind to a halt if users had to solely rely on corporate IT.
I have yet to see a system that gives the power and fexibility to the users like Excel does, but allows for safe and efficient automation.
I know a tax lawyer who uses stuff like this, apparently just with Microsoft Excel, including recursive references (Excel throws a warning for this, but they ignore it). I don't think that crippling the functionality of the software to force people into using code is a good idea. Better to enhance the spreadsheet metaphor to make it work better.
This ideally would include some kind of understandable version control (git has a lot of usability issues, even for programmers), and a better module system (right now they just copy and paste complicated calculations to reuse them for a new client).
I've spent years building calculator apps for healthcare use, where the certification process essentially requires apps to come with unit tests, so I'm definitely biased by my past experience. I'm still somewhat surprised that more people aren't frustrated that spreadsheets make it so hard to build robust software.