introspection (and Perl 6)

[jesse]

> But amazingly, it seems to work. Against all reason, it does enough  
> of what it does to DTRT.
> 
> What can we learn?
> 

My wife spends an astonishing part of her workday in Excel and
considers herself to not be a programmer (She defends this by saying the
closest she's gotten to coding is writing tools in TCL to control
telescopes...and that that wasn't coding either).

Spreadsheets do an amazing job of letting casual end users get useful
programming done. I keep wondering if building tools around a databasey
paradigm rather than a spreadsheety one is the right thing.