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Yes but the majority of excel sheets consist of calculations. The source code of many OO programs will also consist of pure functions if that program is focused

Yes but the majority of excel sheets consist of calculations. The source code of many OO programs will also consist of pure functions if that program is focused on calculation. So calculations are easy to express as pure functions, everybody knows that. On the other hand, if you want to make an interactive application in excel you use VBA which exposes a large and rich set of objects.

Ntrails 10y ago
>On the other hand, if you want to make an interactive application in excel you use VBA which exposes a large and rich set of objects. Please don't encourage this. Because honestly debugging VBA written by consultants has definitely shortened by lifespan by a couple years
eru 10y ago
Yes, VBA is a break away from the nice purely functional world of spreadsheets. Simon Peyton Jones once did some work on giving Excel more programmatic power without having to go to VBA. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/excel/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...
- discreteevent 10y ago
  The paper deals with more examples of calculations: convert fahrenheit to celcius, calculate volume. It does not cover interactive applications. I hope you are not redefining the problem to fit the solution which can be a weakness of pure mathematicians and functional programmers (and negative though it is I have to add: Its a waste of everybody's time. It would be much better if people were direct about what their solution addresses instead of leaving it vaguely defined in the hope that people will think it is of practical use for more than it actually is)
  - eru 10y ago
    Yes, Excel is limited. Yet, people manage to solve lots of business relevant problems within its constraints. Excel is very interactive: you can change input and immediately get a different output. (I think you were trying to talk about a different restriction. Excel is very limited in the kinds of inputs and outputs you can make, and even more so in the kind of side-effects you can cause.)

Ntrails 10y ago

>On the other hand, if you want to make an interactive application in excel you use VBA which exposes a large and rich set of objects. Please don't encourage this. Because honestly debugging VBA written by consultants has definitely shortened by lifespan by a couple years

eru 10y ago

Yes, VBA is a break away from the nice purely functional world of spreadsheets. Simon Peyton Jones once did some work on giving Excel more programmatic power without having to go to VBA. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/excel/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...

discreteevent 10y ago
The paper deals with more examples of calculations: convert fahrenheit to celcius, calculate volume. It does not cover interactive applications. I hope you are not redefining the problem to fit the solution which can be a weakness of pure mathematicians and functional programmers (and negative though it is I have to add: Its a waste of everybody's time. It would be much better if people were direct about what their solution addresses instead of leaving it vaguely defined in the hope that people will think it is of practical use for more than it actually is)
- eru 10y ago
  Yes, Excel is limited. Yet, people manage to solve lots of business relevant problems within its constraints. Excel is very interactive: you can change input and immediately get a different output. (I think you were trying to talk about a different restriction. Excel is very limited in the kinds of inputs and outputs you can make, and even more so in the kind of side-effects you can cause.)