Scripting user-defined functions: OpenOffice vs Gnumeric vs Other...

[chombee]

I'm new to spreadsheets but have a big data coding project that requires
one. I'm quite worried that I'll get deeply involved with one
spreadsheet app, design a big spreadsheet and enter a lot of data,
before realising that I need some computation that it can't do. I'm
gonna need to do some odd computations on this data. The thing that
would save me is a good scripting API, so that I can just write my own
functions with the full power of a programming language. I know Python,
for example.

So far I've been using Gnumeric. It has a Python API that is incomplete
and only partially documented, a C API that is complete but
undocumented, and a Perl API which is undocumented (and I can't hack
Perl). It seems to be a great spreadsheet program otherwise but the
scripting a little worrying.

So I went looking for some sort of documentation or tutorial on what
sort of scripting API OpenOffice Calc provides, but I'm not turning up
much information. I think it has its own scripting language (called Uno
perhaps?) and that there is also an API for Python. Is this correct? How
complete is the scripting support? Is there any good documentation for
it?

Thanks