It may be useful to take people's actual behaviour into account, instead of starting from the assumption that they must be idiots.
As it happens, no tool has been more successful at making this idea of "everyone being a coder" than the spreadsheet. It's an excellent (pun intended) gateway drug, with low barriers of entry, and a value proposition that was obvious enough to get accountants to spend 5 figures on a Mac when computers were something completely new.
Sure, the language is clunky. But it's apparently enough for most peoples' needs. I can't immediately think of any reasons for this almost moralistic criticism of Excel.
It seems like it would be a weekend project to convert Excel worksheets to sequential code in a universally-readable textfile, plus a separate CSV for the data. That would make sharing and reproducibility just as easy as easy as getting them to switch out their complete toolchain. But I have doubts that unwillingness to share code & data is actually a technical problems, instead of a lack of incentives/embarrassment of sharing ones' awful code/dreams of patents future/privacy issues.
I'm also not convinced that Julia as I have experienced it would be any better for long-term reproducibility. Last time I tried Julia, about every second package had a specific version that it required, and very few of them shared their preferences.
As it happens, no tool has been more successful at making this idea of "everyone being a coder" than the spreadsheet. It's an excellent (pun intended) gateway drug, with low barriers of entry, and a value proposition that was obvious enough to get accountants to spend 5 figures on a Mac when computers were something completely new.
Sure, the language is clunky. But it's apparently enough for most peoples' needs. I can't immediately think of any reasons for this almost moralistic criticism of Excel.
It seems like it would be a weekend project to convert Excel worksheets to sequential code in a universally-readable textfile, plus a separate CSV for the data. That would make sharing and reproducibility just as easy as easy as getting them to switch out their complete toolchain. But I have doubts that unwillingness to share code & data is actually a technical problems, instead of a lack of incentives/embarrassment of sharing ones' awful code/dreams of patents future/privacy issues.
I'm also not convinced that Julia as I have experienced it would be any better for long-term reproducibility. Last time I tried Julia, about every second package had a specific version that it required, and very few of them shared their preferences.