This is a discussion that happens in a lot of different fields of practice. In medicine, you might have the argument over to what extent chiropractors or naturopaths are physicians; /r/justrolledintotheshop, one of my guilty pleasures, has recurring posts about embarrassing things that shadetrees have done. Right now they're doing the, "hah, car mechanics? Try being a boat mechanic! Hah, boat mechanic? Try being a diesel mechanic! Hah, diesel mechanic?..." It's all pretty light-hearted, one of the reasons that I like that sub, but still, there are similarities.<p>I get where they're coming from. I've put some effort into teaching programming to other people too: young kids, guys with electronics backgrounds but not software, even a homeless kid. I look at programming as a skill, like dancing, martial arts, or swimming, that can be practiced and improved for anyone that wants to put the time in to it.<p>But then sometimes I find myself on the other side of the fence, where a project is being made a lot more difficult by someone because, "I know Wordpress, so I'll just handle this complicated not-Wordpress-related hosting issue myself." Or, "my system was acting strange recently, and I saw this thing about hackers on NCIS, so I..."<p>So that's where I start to have a problem with thinking of spreadsheets as programming. Technically, Jacques is right, it absolutely is. People do hilariously incredible things with Excel -- even flight simulators! (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmlqgQidXtk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmlqgQidXtk</a>) But it's also not the same as developing an api or wrangling some other more advanced project, and when the people you're working with understand programming to be as difficult as a spreadsheet, it can make for some hopeless no-win situations.<p>At least in martial arts, if you decide to spar with somebody that's a lot more advanced than you, you'll learn your mistake pretty quickly. If you practice swimming in a backyard pool and then decide to have a go at the ocean, you'll have a pretty sobering experience if you're lucky. But in software, it's possible to muddle along for quite a long time, making a really expensive mess, before you realize that you're in over your head. (Which probably most of us have done at some point.)