introspection (and Perl 6)

[jesse]

> 
> Ages ago at $dayjob, i had a cow-orker who spent several months  
> writing Fourier transforms and other crazy analysis crap in Excel,  
> pushing pivot tables to the limit, with super fancy charts, complex  
> non-tabular input file parsing, simply an amazing amount of stuff.   
> But the ability to repeat this analysis on other copies of Excel on  
> other users' desks, with other datasets, was estimated at "a fair  
> amount of work".  Nobody else could get it to work at all.
> 
> I and a different coworker reimplemented this whole thing with perl,  
> mysql, php, and gnuplot in about three hours.  It has been working  
> with truly minimal maintenance for about seven years, now, with tens  
> of thousands of data records.  Please note that we were nowhere near  
> what you'd call software experts at the time.
> 
> In short, the model we discovered was "prototype it in a spreadsheet,  
> then port it to Real Tools for process automation."

So. Why couldn't there be a real process automation-capable tool that
presents a spreadsheet-style progamming model?