The most popular programming language in the world is the one with column headers. By every reasonable count of users, more people write code in Excel formulas than in Python, JavaScript, and SQL combined. This isn't a fun fact about the size of Excel's user base. It's a question about the size of the term programmer . The developer community has been quietly choosing not to count spreadsheet authors as programmers for thirty years. Microsoft made that choice harder to defend in 2020, and the gatekeeping persisted anyway. Worth asking why. The reach Estimates of Excel's global user base run from a billion to a billion and a half, depending on how you count. The most recent numbers from Microsoft put Microsoft 365 active users above 320 million , and the broader Excel install base (unlicensed copies, school deployments, Excel-for-the-web sessions) significantly exceeds that. By comparison, the self-identified developer population is small.…