Really awesome 3-part series about spreadsheets written from the programmer’s perspective 
. After reading these articles it’s clear why many companies are building a more flexible solution than Excel. TLDR:
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Spreadsheets are programs
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Spreadsheets made the PC market
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Spreadsheets run the world
The author summarizes the challenges with supplanting Excel:
They are largely a single-user, desktop tools and not “native” citizens of the web. Online spreadsheets are still fairly basic compared to Microsoft Excel’s power running on a local machine, but what is worse: With the exception of (some) collaboration features, they are largely a transfer of the desktop-client metaphor to a client running in the browser with little notice of the things that are truly different when you’re running “in the cloud”.
The author also mentions RescueTime (which I wrote about here) and states 25% of computer users use Excel on a daily basis!
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In the first article the author talks about functional and reactive programming and refers to Bret Victor’s talk about “Inventing on Principle.” WHO IS THIS MAGICIAN??? His talk is absolutely mind-blowing 
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This sent me down the rabbit hole of discovering Bret Victor’s projects, and I came across this gem which discusses strategies for new users to understand programming. I see some parallels between Victor’s ideas and Coda’s formula language. Victor makes a side not about spreadsheets in the “See the State” section:
One of the all-time most popular programming models is the spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is the dual of a conventional programming language – a language shows all the code, but hides the data. A spreadsheet shows all the data, but hides the code. Some people believe that spreadsheets are popular because of their two-dimensional grid, but that’s a minor factor. Spreadsheets rule because they show the data.
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