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The biggest problem with spreadsheet-oriented programming is that we haven't yet found the way to abstract table sections into reusable 'functions', which curre

The biggest problem with spreadsheet-oriented programming is that we haven't yet found the way to abstract table sections into reusable 'functions', which currently leads to tons of copy/paste. There was a proposal to add user-defined table-based functions to Excel, by a group of authors including none other than Simon Peyton Jones, a major contributor to Haskell and GHC. Here's that paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/excel/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... Curiously, the paper is titled 'Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel'. (And by the way, you can already name and refer to any range of cells in Excel, not just a row or a column. There's also a GUI dialog that lets you manage the names, e.g. rename, delete etc.)

digi_owl 10y ago
I wonder if functions, or their equivalent, is what makes programming complicated for many. Because now you have one set of code that crops up in multiple places, and have different states depending on how it gets used in those locations. The reason people reach for spreadsheets seems to be because they are visual. much like the register panel "blinkenlights" on early computers, spreadsheets allows someone to glance across and check the state of things. And in an earlier discussion about this, someone pointed me to Apple's Numbers spreadsheet. There you can have multiple freely moveable and expandable sheets on screen at the same time, each addressable via its own name.