alt Hacker NewsAnd the main reason excel works is because it's very tangible. Referencing by cell address is obvious in ways declaring variables isn't. And the formula style is similar to the f(x) we learned in high school. And they are domain primitives instead of weird things like main() or sys.exit().
But most people don't like to program. They want to use their computer to do a task. And maybe they think of a novel way to do the task, but it's not a daily or even monthly occurrence. And even then they lack the training to fully specify their ideas (it's tedious for a reason). And from what I've seen, almost no one wants to spend the day trying to get it out a probability machine.
You're spot-on that excel managed to break through because it's one of the few kinds of rigidness that was both legible and familiar enough to the average person. But very little else is, because the average person doesn't think in precision.
> they lack the training to fully specify their ideas (it's tedious for a reason)
> almost no one wants to spend the day trying to get it out a probability machine
These are opposing statements. What AI does best is taking fuzziness or under-specification and making sense out of it. For the first time in history, computers don't need precise instruction to be useful.