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Many people, including Microsoft, have tried and failed extrapolate on spreadsheeting towards a more general purpose programming environment, and it turns out t
by siddboots 10y ago
Many people, including Microsoft, have tried and failed extrapolate on spreadsheeting towards a more general purpose programming environment, and it turns out to be very hard. A 2D grid of editable cells without a type system makes for a great scratchpad environment, but those features are also a barrier for abstraction.
- Swizec 10y ago> A 2D grid of editable cells without a type system That sounds like a big improvement on the model we all use every day: a 1D grid of editable memory locations without a[n inherent] type system.
- bbcbasic 10y agoWho uses such a model? Unless you write assembly language?
- taneq 10y agoThe reason this keeps failing is that people don't want to do programming in Excel. They definitely don't want to do general purpose programming in Excel. They just want to use some formulas to calculate some things. Of course, what they're doing is programming, but the genius of spreadsheets is that it lets "non-programmers" program while hiding from them the fact that they're programming.