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Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

15 points by msie 17y ago

_delirium 17y ago
Sophisticated simulations done in Excel happen in industry more often than you might think, using all manner of graphics hacks for the display, ranging from using cells for the display, to "pop up a new chart three times a second for 3 fps animation". It seems particularly common in finance and some kinds of engineering. I can't help but cringe when I see it, though.
- emarcotte 17y ago
  Yes, and in addition to this, those many MB spread sheets are also feared by the people who maintain them. I have seen spreadsheets that have migrated from ancient lotus products that I never knew about. There is code in them that people do not know what it means or does. Having to update the equations they are using periodically causes lots of panic because who knows what depends on what. It's all hidden in cells. The worst part is, at least with the sheets I'm specifically thinking of, they were essentially just rows of data like you'd find in an SQL table. It's a shame they didn't take the time to initially develop it as a table or several tables and put some real code around it to run the calculations. At least then someone could go and look at it and figure out what it does.
  - euroclydon 17y ago
    Maybe they can migrate to Resolver One.
ggruschow 17y ago
He jokes and people cringe, but Excel is a huge win in some sorts of.. I'm not sure what to call it. I hesitate to call it programming because programming to me means all the text-file stuff from BASIC to C to Python to Haskell. It's a language that lacks the headaches of state and sports a wonderfully helpful editing and debugging/execution environment. Trying to get your calculations right while seeing tons of the intermediate results is often a lot easier, also, you don't have to worry about calculation order or dependencies.. It's automatically handled, as are incremental update calculations. I often wonder how we could get a similar benefits in non-spreadsheets. That said, it's a crumby language. You basically have to memorize the whole language to do well with it. Tons of stuff could be be dramatically better.. in fact, in some cases they were, e.g. functions defined in spreadsheet cells, but MS killed the competitors.
ajuc 17y ago
Excel (and other spreadsheets) is nice purely functional language (when not using macros). Unfortunately it is abused to be database/statistical package/etc and at some point big spreadsheets doesn't scale and becomse pain to support. So it should be possible to export excel spreadsheet to haskell :)
Groxx 17y ago
Excel supports this traditional sequential top-down approach in the VBA codes (see the example on the previous page) and additionally it provides a very new, fresh and revolutionary opportunity as well. "very new"? "fresh"? "revolutionary"? I call BS. They then go on to show the basic idea of object-oriented programming. The call-references in auditing is cool, but it's also quite doable in a debugger (though I don't know of any which work this "graphically"). Admittedly, the graphics probably make it a lot easier to non-programmers, but the language has nothing new in it.

15 points by msie 17y ago

Sophisticated simulations done in Excel happen in industry more often than you might think, using all manner of graphics hacks for the display, ranging from using cells for the display, to "pop up a new chart three times a second for 3 fps animation". It seems particularly common in finance and some kinds of engineering. I can't help but cringe when I see it, though.

emarcotte 17y ago
Yes, and in addition to this, those many MB spread sheets are also feared by the people who maintain them. I have seen spreadsheets that have migrated from ancient lotus products that I never knew about. There is code in them that people do not know what it means or does. Having to update the equations they are using periodically causes lots of panic because who knows what depends on what. It's all hidden in cells. The worst part is, at least with the sheets I'm specifically thinking of, they were essentially just rows of data like you'd find in an SQL table. It's a shame they didn't take the time to initially develop it as a table or several tables and put some real code around it to run the calculations. At least then someone could go and look at it and figure out what it does.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  Maybe they can migrate to Resolver One.

ggruschow 17y ago

He jokes and people cringe, but Excel is a huge win in some sorts of.. I'm not sure what to call it. I hesitate to call it programming because programming to me means all the text-file stuff from BASIC to C to Python to Haskell. It's a language that lacks the headaches of state and sports a wonderfully helpful editing and debugging/execution environment. Trying to get your calculations right while seeing tons of the intermediate results is often a lot easier, also, you don't have to worry about calculation order or dependencies.. It's automatically handled, as are incremental update calculations. I often wonder how we could get a similar benefits in non-spreadsheets. That said, it's a crumby language. You basically have to memorize the whole language to do well with it. Tons of stuff could be be dramatically better.. in fact, in some cases they were, e.g. functions defined in spreadsheet cells, but MS killed the competitors.

ajuc 17y ago

Excel (and other spreadsheets) is nice purely functional language (when not using macros). Unfortunately it is abused to be database/statistical package/etc and at some point big spreadsheets doesn't scale and becomse pain to support. So it should be possible to export excel spreadsheet to haskell :)

Groxx 17y ago

Excel supports this traditional sequential top-down approach in the VBA codes (see the example on the previous page) and additionally it provides a very new, fresh and revolutionary opportunity as well. "very new"? "fresh"? "revolutionary"? I call BS. They then go on to show the basic idea of object-oriented programming. The call-references in auditing is cool, but it's also quite doable in a debugger (though I don't know of any which work this "graphically"). Admittedly, the graphics probably make it a lot easier to non-programmers, but the language has nothing new in it.