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I don't think state is the problem. I think the visibility of state is a problem. In most programming, state is some nebulous thing that you really only get to see in a debugger. Otherwise, you're left reasoning about what you think the states are and can be. How many bugs trace down to statements like, "This data shouldn't be here."

That's why Excel works for so many people -- the internal and intermediate states can be as visible as the user needs or desires them to be. And those users seem to have no problem chaining together multiple cells into what is essentially a very complex function.




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