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I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive

by mabbo 9y ago

I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. It's a brilliant reactive data programming model that makes intuitive sense to non-technical users. They feel empowered to use it to solve problems right now with a computer. They experiment with it, try things, Google how to do more things- just like any programmer does. And they feel capable of doing this because they don't know they're programming. Within the Amazon warehouse world, I have seen incredible innovation using it. An acquaintance of mine got into development by using it to help save soldiers lives while serving in Afghanistan[0]. I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7950190

microcolonel 9y ago
I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build processes would probably create more than a billion dollars of real value every year with even limited adoption. While it may be true that Excel is overused, I believe that the spreadsheet is chronically underused as a model for software development.
- piaste 9y ago
  This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/?
      - microcolonel 9y ago
        That's quite cool, thanks for the link. Tables seem to be a more popular model for finance and similar, but it's always interesting to see new data models like this. This could allow for more interesting things like gathering fields from records into a meta-table from a relational DB, that would definitely be a valuable next step.
      - flarg 9y ago
        Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful
        rakoo 9y ago
        Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.
        flarg 9y ago
        Mathematical functions, easy formatting, and more anything a purpose. Basically it does thinga you don't want a spreadsheet to do. It's more akin to a mind mapper and there are easier to use tools for that.
        walterbell 9y ago
        It’s a good foundation for future open-source development, uses wxWidgets toolkit for cross-platform desktops. Author has graphics background, now busy at BigCo.
      - rootw0rm 9y ago
        i can't believe i found something cool in a comments section about Excel.
  - phonon 9y ago
    This looks similar https://github.com/dgorissen/pycel https://github.com/dgorissen/pycel or perhaps https://github.com/xuri/efp https://github.com/xuri/efp
- anakic 9y ago
  I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may. I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation. The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are: - process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq - move data between Excel and databases - fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code) - replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage. It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com http://www.querystorm.com. I posted about it a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488 Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594 https://vimeo.com/242216594
  - 0x445442 9y ago
    Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps. My first heavy use of Excel was in a thermodynamics class in college. We modeled heat gradients for various HVAC systems with Excel. After that, I used it to calculate stresses and strains of different structures using each cell as a node in finite element analysis model.
  - bsenftner 9y ago
    I did something like this in 2002 for a VFX house; but it was loading a DLL that hot loaded other DLLs, queried the routines and exposed them as Excel functions. Through that I pulled in a stochastic modeling framework I wrote, and pulled in 5 years of the studio's timecard records to create a production forecasting system, right down to selecting the correct staff for each position, with backup people, for 1200 digital artists. The Excel "spreadheet" was something like 250 MB when saved with a film production in it.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
- osullivj 9y ago
  Interesting: optimized for integration is what I've been doing too. If you've got a minute to take a look at the links in my profile I'd be keen to hear your feedback.
GiorgioG 9y ago
When I consulted at a health insurance company (a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with 1000 employees, 200 IT staff) about 10 years ago, I was absolutely horrified that the system of record for health care plan data was Excel spreadsheets. They had staff who would update the claims processing system based on thousands of spreadsheets. When you called customer service, the CSR app would auto-open the member's plan information XLS file to the CSR rep. It got the job done - but it was the wrong tool for the job. We recommended they implement a PDM (product data management) system - it would have saved them millions of dollars (considering they had a staff of 20 whose sole job was to update the claims processing system by hand based on these spreadsheets.) Unfortunately when the 2008 financial crisis happened, management balked at the initial outlay. It's quite possible they're still using Excel to this day.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  There are upsides to excel in cases like that… The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently… I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and those advantages erode as the setup gets more complex and/or has more people using it. But, there are reasons excel gets used this way. The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs. I’m going to repeat again that I am not advocating health insurance companies run policies and claims in excel. It is a bad idea, almost certainly. I am saying that we should be curious at why they are doing it this way. I think it’s a “good” question in that it leads to interesting places. If the excel team was blessed with a plague of inspiration tomorrow morning, Is there a way they could make it so that excel is the right way to manage an insurance business?
  - GiorgioG 9y ago
    > The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs. The alternative doesn't have to have a high failure rate. I was brought in to help reboot their in-house implementation of a product data management system - the core issue was they didn't have any real competency in software development (though they believed they did.) Ultimately I recommended they abandon the in-house effort and instead proposed using an off-the-shelf PDM system, we evaluated quite a few decent options over the course of six months and found several that met the business's requirements. It would have been the right thing to do and I believe it would have been successful. Culturally the IT department staff was plagued with not-invented-here syndrome. It was a generally dysfunctional IT group and it's quite likely that Excel got it's start as the system of record because the business needed to get the job done, and the IT department was unable or unwilling to deliver.
avar 9y ago
Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
- jasongill 9y ago
  PowerPoint, while popular, has no where near the widespread use of Excel. In most businesses, PowerPoint is the sort of thing you use once a month, once a week maybe if you are doing a lot of meetings. Excel gets used daily or even hourly by members of almost every department in businesses large and small. I would agree with OP that Excel is the most-used programming environment of all time
ransom1538 9y ago
You can do crazy shit in excel. After someone opens an excel sheet - download a webpage and save it to disk? no problem. Lets load other excel files in memory and run their scripts too! Don't worry about your computer fan - while we scan your disk for stuff. Just state "On Error Resume Next" and start scanning hardware. Company email accounts are stuffed with one off sketchy excel attachments. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-download-webpage-complete https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-downl...
- lukateake 9y ago
  When you put it like that, ransom1538, I'm not going to click the link!
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  The idea is that general Excel files do not run macros. They need to be saved with a special extension and you need to manually approve macros, with warnings if the file is in a location where other users can write to the file. I have no idea how watertight this is though, it’s Microsoft quality (and some of the most ancient code they have) so I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
ajlburke 9y ago
I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over). Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - but it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication, built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different topic). Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases. Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed. This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases. In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications. Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sheetjs 9y ago
  > my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications. Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best: > Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657 FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries to read and write spreadsheets (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, demo http://oss.sheetjs.com/ http://oss.sheetjs.com/) ended up garnering lots of demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications
  - 9y ago
rb808 9y ago
Functional programming before it was fashionable!
- mabbo 9y ago
  This is how I like to explain functional programming to developers today. When you say "Functional Programming", a lot of devs think "scary complicated thing". When you say "Basic excel spreadsheets" they go "anyone can do that!".
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Excel is a very limited form of functional programming. It's sort of SIMD and it eschews side effects, but it has no first class functions which is extremely frustrated and -non-functional
    - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
      Perhaps a better term is declarative?
sheetjs 9y ago
Excel is simultaneously flexible enough to solve a wide array of problems and structured enough to enable larger tasks like slicing and filtering data. This article is trying to push for cloud-based silos that solve specific problems, but most of them fall apart in "real-world" scenarios because they aren't flexible enough to support the ad-hoc workflows people have developed over years.
- otakucode 9y ago
  The dystopia that I fear is an endless gauntlet of powerless employees droning 'the computer doesn't have a field for that' or 'the computer won't let me do that'. We already seem perilously close to this, putting the consistency of systems ostensibly built to serve the needs of society over and above the needs of society.
tomrod 9y ago
Completely agree. I think simply enforcing a version control would be sufficient to solve most Excel woes, however. It doesn't solve manual user error (a la Reinhart-Rogoff), but it's a good next step.
phkahler 9y ago
MS access is often a way better tool for what people do. The problem is that it requires a bit more work up front, a little more abstraction, and usually some programming. Having said that, most companies have people in IT that can help out something like that together for people but that's not their job.
- toyg 9y ago
  > it requires a bit more work up front Because of this "bit more work", it's also much less flexible in the long run. Excel is not a great database, but it's a highly flexible one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Does access have a spreadsheet view for bulk editing?
  - tinus_hn 9y ago
    Yes, it’s called the datasheet view.
    - TakerofVita 9y ago
      Access does have a datasheet view, but it is _much_ less powerful than Excel e.g. copy/paste multiple cells, fill down, and it is SLOWER.
      - phkahler 9y ago
        In a database you don't "fill down". You build a query to generate what you want (enter the expressions once) and click on the "data sheet" view for the query. It's different, but the simplicity of referencing $A$5 in excel and using whatever cells you want as inputs is way simpler than any way you might take user inputs in Access.
wpietri 9y ago
I definitely agree that spreadsheets (of which Excel is just the latest) have drawn a lot of people into basic programming. But at the same time, it has stunted a lot of people's growth because of its sharp limitations. Spreadsheets have a lot of similarities to the sort of code bases that as an industry we've been moving away from. E.g., no version control, no tests, opaque code, bugs are hard to find, write-only code, bit rot, random antique scripts used in critical spots, poor reusability, latest version is on somebody's hard drive somewhere, nobody knows which version is the right one. I also think it's deeply unfortunate that there's no good path from spreadsheet master to real developer. As great as spreadsheets are, they're a cul de sac. I hope this new generation of tools fixes that. If not, somebody sure should.
sliverstorm 9y ago
I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business. You would have thought this would be obvious- it seems analogous to perl/python or other such Swiss army knife tools we use for quick one-off solutions that occasionally get pressed into permanent formal use where they shouldn't.
- kazagistar 9y ago
  Python (and probably Perl too) work fine for permanent formal use as long as they are engineered as such. I have seen clear, well structured permanent code bases in python. The problem is just that people like coding one off prototypes in python, and those end up in prod; it's just as bad as when Java prototypes end up in prod, but who actually wants to write prototypes in Java, if given the choice?
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    Couldn't you argue the same thing about excel? It does not lend itself to well engineered permanent formal use, but you certainly could build a robust system with it.
bognition 9y ago
The issue isn't that you can't program in excel the issue is that excel lacks many of the safeguards that have been built around programming in the last few years. Version control for excel is terrible at best. Code review is basically non-existent and how could it be when logic is split over several cells and variables are named $A17 or B23. I think the win with excel is its super simple interface, that said there is plenty of room to improve on the programming language interface.
- com2kid 9y ago
  > variables are named $A17 or B23. Excel lets you name tables, cell ranges, or individual cells. I have seen spreadsheets put together by people who take the time to do this, and they are remarkably readable!
  - bognition 9y ago
    TIL, thanks for letting me know
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Way back before they added visual basic into it Excel had what was called a Macro language that was also built in sheets - just slightly different appearance (very wide cells) and altered functionality (to prevent you from doing numerical operations to your macro code). I think this was around version 4? Anyway, it basically worked like a stack, with the currently selected cell being the instruction pointer. So when debugging you could either look at your data and watch blocks of numbers flashing in and out of existence or changing state, or look at the macro sheet and watch the pointer bounce around as it went to different branches or sat in loops or whatever. There were commands to turn screen updates on and off (which sped things up considerably) so as you got more and more of it working it would go from looking like some confusing nightmare to a smooth list of progress bars and passed sanity checks. They moved to VBS because programmers were finding the cell model too restrictive/weird, and for integration with Access, but doing it all in cells was remarkably and pleasantly like assembly-level debugging. You'd hack something up quickly, figure out your algorithm, then name the ranges and use and index value, and you could lock ranges and what-all else. It wasn't as easy to read as a page of code (eg no whitespace) but the crudity of it pushed you towards that sort of 1-operation-per-line discipline that assembler demands and really forced you to think about semantic efficiency. I had macros consisting of thousands of cells of code with every single operation commented. You could, in turn, name the ranges that had macro code in them and do code profiling to find out where your performance bottlenecks were, and so on.
Robotbeat 9y ago
Completely agree. It's common to tell kids (and everyone) that they need to "learn to code." That is what Excel already is! And it's incredibly powerful, especially if you don't have any other coding skills. But, of course, it's messy. When tens of millions of people can each write their own programs and easily modify them and change them to suit their own needs without needing to recompile or anything, then you get the mess which is Excel. ...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!). But that's fine. Give humans tools, and they'll find clever ways of using them that you don't intend. And it'll continue to drive people crazy. In some ways, the Excel hate (though obviously not unfounded) seems almost kind of like a bourgeoisie elitism. THIS is what it looks like when you give everyone the ability to code!
- DougWebb 9y ago
  ...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!). That's exactly what happened with Perl when everyone learned to use, modify, and develop CGI scripts in the early days of web-based application development. Dynamically-generated website content worked and evolved into the web we know today, but those scripts were awful and did a lot of harm to Perl's reputation.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    I personally think that a lot of notoriety from Perl stemmed from insane overuse of regular expressions. I'm not talking simple and concise expressions doing ordinary useful things, but rather insanely long and intricate ones which one had to be at a god-expert-level on regex just to attempt to understand. These kinds of expressions are what ultimately caused the derisive terming of Perl as "line noise". It was really unfair, to say the least, because there were plenty of ways to code in Perl and do so cleanly, with a minimal usage of regex. Honestly, it seemed more like people were coding in regular expressions, and simply using Perl as a "run-time" wrapper for those expressions (and maybe those expressions existed first; I don't know). I'm not the greatest fan of regular expressions (to me - especially on more complex operations - it is almost like programming the tape of a Turing machine), but I do know they have their place in the world. However, because the "language" (if you will) of regex allows for an extreme number of operations and such, it almost succumbs to an "inner platform effect", allowing those with familiarity to roam free, to the detriment of future maintainers. That said - none of this is new. If you go back to the beginning of microcomputing, you'll find the same thing happened with the various dialects of BASIC, as people self-taught themselves programming in that language, then spread the knowledge thru various means (magazines, books, and later bbs systems) - it became a horrible mess, even though it all pretty much "worked".
mark-r 9y ago
Excel is the Swiss Army Knife application - it isn't the best tool, but it's the most versatile and the one you have with you. Good insight about the relation to programming.
poimpoij8878 9y ago
Jupyter notebooks are the new Excel
gordonguthrie 9y ago
https://vimeo.com/42266454 https://vimeo.com/42266454
osteele 9y ago
"The dynamic spreadsheet is a good example of such a tissuelike superobject. It is a simulation kit, and it provides a remarkable degree of direct leverage. Spreadsheets at their best combine the genres established in the 1970s (objects, windows, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing and goal-seeking retrieval) into a “better old thing” that is likely to be one of the “almost new things” for the mainstream designs of the next few years. "A spreadsheet is an aggregate of concurrently active objects, usually organized into a rectangular array of cells similar to the paper spreadsheet used by an accountant. […] A spreadsheet is a simulated pocket universe that continuously maintains its fabric; it is a kit for a surprising range of applications.” – Alan Kay, “Computer Software”, Scientific American (1984). pp. 56–57. PDF: https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-computer-software-sciam-sept-84.pdf https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-com... Republished as “Computer Software” (1984). pp. 6–7. PDF: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/130/Alan%20Kay%20-%20ComputerSoftware-SA.pdf http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/130/Alan%20Kay%20-...
8ytecoder 9y ago
Excel totally totally missed the wonderful opportunity to do so much better than Google Spreadsheets. They could have created a centralized shared way of creating, editing, sharing and storing data. Their limitations as it exists today are ludicrous at best - 10 max users? Give companies a way to keep the data in a centrally managed place with access control and auditing and users the ability to freely share their creations (and data)...
samstave 9y ago
I think that excel is one of the best applications on the market. Every single department in any company can benefit from knowing it well. The problem is getting people comfortable and competent to know it well. This is where I think google sheets fucking failed: they should have made an effort to make sure every single gmail user had a tutorial to know how to empower their curiosities and interests via google sheets.
kakwa_ 9y ago
Excel remains a tool. It can be a really powerful one I agree. It's simple to use, a lot of people knows how to handle it. And it's probably one of the best tools to do some quick data analysis. However, like every tool, it has its pros & cons. One of the main cons, IMHO, is that data tends to be mixed with processing a lot (but it also simplify usage, so...). Overall spreadsheets have been really helpful. Retrospectively, there is a good reason why it triggered the personal computers boom in the 80ies. They are good adhoc tools that can help lot. And Excel is the dominant one. However, there are tons of horror stories around Excel, worst case scenario, it has lead to wrong decisions affecting the world economy. I've personally a few horror stories (fortunately, not affecting the world economy). At my last job, we used an internal spreadsheet to evaluate costs and margins when answering contract bids. This spreadsheet was a monstrosity taking ages to compute and it was a nightmare to manage, sync, and share between all the participants. I've also seen the traditional "on what did you work last week" spreadsheet, quite annoying to update, even more given that my workstation is under Linux... I've also seen spreadsheets as specification documents, generating an xml file, which in turn, through some xslt, was used to generate C++/C++ headers files describing an interface between two sub-systems. The concept (automating spec to code translation) was really interesting. However, I don't know about you, but I personally hate to have MS Office in the tool chain used to compile a piece of software, specially when it targets Linux and only Linux... But those are not the most terrifying spreadsheets I've seen. The most terrifying on was a giant spreadsheet basically managing every aspects of a huge project (thousands of piece of equipment, hundreds of sites). This document was so big it took several hours just to open it. It was like a giant CMDB of all the configuration items, and, trust me there were a lot. But it also did more, a lot more. It was generating configuration files for applications, background images for monitoring maps, firewall rules... It was also a tool that helped architect and size the number of equipment required for a given site. I probably don't know the full extent of its functionalities. Just to give you an idea of its complexity, at one point, even the number of cells in a whole excel document was reached (with Office 2003 however). All the auto-generated stuff were always kind of wrong and had to be fixed by hand, which made for a repetitive, annoying and error prone process. Also, there was no clear naming convention, and it was a mess to take the generated stuff and load it in our automation scripts. It was, de-facto, a huge piece of software with no versioning, tests or QA and it showed. There was only one guy behind it, basically managing the beast full time. When he was sick or on PTO, the whole project was impacted. And when he left, it was a huge mess, nobody was able to take over. Spreadsheets are great, but past an adhoc usage, please, please, please, implement something more serious. And also, keep track of Excel usage to avoid these kinds of monsters. Often there are real needs behind these beasts, but Excel is a really horrible choice in the long run. Related commitstrip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-beast/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-b...
beached_whale 9y ago
Many of the larger businesses I have seen(not too many) have a disconnect between the subject matter experts that use Excel to codify their knowledge and the developers. The program(Excel workbook) often isn't big enough to warrant the dev costs when it works "now" but is too important not to in the long run. I do think this is a tooling issue that could generate code based on Excel workbooks.
eighthnate 9y ago
> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. I wouldn't say Excel is a programming language - unless you are referring to VBA attached to excel. Excel is a spreadsheet application. It's no more a programming language than Microsoft Word is a programming language.
mpweiher 9y ago
> reactive data programming model Can we say "one way dataflow constraint system"? They're even called "spreadsheet constraints"...
rukuu001 9y ago
I found this just the other day: A User-Centred Approach to Functions in Excel [PDF][2003]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/excel.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
arthurjj 9y ago
> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. Anytime another programmer asks me what language they should learn I tell them Excel and they think I'm joking. Besides being a quick and dirty way to solve a variety of problems it helps you speak in the language of your users (if you work in B2B)
tomc1985 9y ago
Honestly the article stinks like an advertorial of cloud vendors trying to push their wares. I agree that Excel isn't a good fit for many things, but blanket rules like 'no excel' seem counterproductive. Why do we readers take these sorts of things at face value? You know the whole article is a sales pitch.
- emacsgifs 9y ago
  I suppose you either understand how PR works and simply disregard anything printed or broadcast and do your own research, and accept this system unlikely to change... Or you get irritated by it, while waiting for the "inevitable" collapse of this promotional/propaganda model... Honestly I don't know what is happening, but it seemed like the first option, which I've followed for a couple of decades is a good enough cure for disillusionment and depression. (Caused by investing in the second option) Edit: add quotes to inevitable.
jsemrau 9y ago
Agreed! The business critical solutions (!) you can build quickly with Excel that even non-technical people can understand is the real MVP.
vba 9y ago
M$ft XL developer here. I attended a conference to meet our Excel guru users and it's fairly impressive what these non-coders achieve. Excel is like an operating system to them, and they even create Excel files to "debug" there other Excel files, e.g. debugging the order of formula calculation and validating the output at each step in their property assets spreadsheets - without using any VBA
spynxic 9y ago
"[Excel's non-VBA interface is] a brilliant reactive data programming model.." Also known as functional programming
hden 9y ago
> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. Indeed, I'd also argue that the most commonly used database is Excel. Although few people using it realize they're designing schema.
mr_toad 9y ago
Every excel spreadsheet is an error waiting to happen. Implicit & unexplained business rules, no tests, no version control, unlabeled cell references, hardwired variables, everything is global, no encapsulation, no logs and no documentation. Even assembly code is easier read and maintain than a complicated excel workbook.
_diyu 9y ago
> few of the people using it realize they're programming An idea I've been toying with for a few months now is an automation app (read: window manager) whose UI is somewhere between Excel and GameMaker Studio's drag & drop UI. Like where you just have a giant grid/canvas, and where you can define "routines" and "variables" as groups of cells. If I could figure it out, I think it would open up the idea of an automation app to a broader scope, to people who aren't programmers, and I might be able to make some money off it. Especially considering I made like $500 in donations for Hydra back when I was doing more WM stuff for Mac, so there seems to be some excitement for the idea of programming your Mac, but perhaps it could be a living if I can figure out how to reach out to power users who aren't programmers. And it was your comment that gave me the idea of making it more like a grid instead of more like GameMaker. So, thanks!
azernik 9y ago
I agree - it's also really useful as a prototyping language, since its accessibility allows domain experts to really make something that suits their workflow. My current company (Parsley, www.parsleycooks.com) would have been a lot harder to do without looking at the Excel sheets that the more tech-savvy and organized chefs use for logistics work.
rhelmer 9y ago
In the book "A Small Matter of Programming"[0] (1993), Bonnie A. Nardi makes the case that there are really only two successful end user programming systems - spreadsheets and CAD. I think that's just as true today, at least as far as business software goes. 0 - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming
eru 9y ago
Compare "Improving the world’s most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improving-worlds-popular-functional-language-user-defined-functions-excel/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...
- thanatropism 9y ago
  UDFs are the real LPT. Much of gnarly spreadsheeting going around has to do with having to simulate loops with rows or just partition very large formulas (think option pricing formulas) into partial result cells.
  - eru 9y ago
    Could you explain your first sentence? The acronyms are a bit dense. Edit: UDF is user defined functions. What's LPT?

by mabbo 9y ago

microcolonel 9y ago

I've been working on a spreadsheet which is more amenable to embedding in programs (compiling to an IR which can be translated to high level languages or [eventually] compiler IRs like those of LLVM or GCC). I worked at a company where months were spent recreating models from a spreadsheet produced by subject matter experts, and this was a major cost. A spreadsheet optimized for integration into software build processes would probably create more than a billion dollars of real value every year with even limited adoption. While it may be true that Excel is overused, I believe that the spreadsheet is chronically underused as a model for software development.

piaste 9y ago
This idea looks super interesting. Is the source already online, or will be?
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Will be, "soon". It turns out it's difficult to get the basics of a spreadsheet right. I made the mistake of trying to use an existing spreadsheet application (like LibreOffice Calc or Excel) as the source format early on.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Have you seen Treesheets, http://strlen.com/treesheets/ http://strlen.com/treesheets/?
    - microcolonel 9y ago
      That's quite cool, thanks for the link. Tables seem to be a more popular model for finance and similar, but it's always interesting to see new data models like this. This could allow for more interesting things like gathering fields from records into a meta-table from a relational DB, that would definitely be a valuable next step.
    - flarg 9y ago
      Was minorly obsessed with this a couple of years ago. Is very interesting but ultimately lacks a lot that could make it useful
      - rakoo 9y ago
        Out of curiosity, what's missing from it ? I've been meaning to use it but still haven't found actual uses, I'd love to see what others do with it.
        flarg 9y ago
        Mathematical functions, easy formatting, and more anything a purpose. Basically it does thinga you don't want a spreadsheet to do. It's more akin to a mind mapper and there are easier to use tools for that.
      - walterbell 9y ago
        It’s a good foundation for future open-source development, uses wxWidgets toolkit for cross-platform desktops. Author has graphics background, now busy at BigCo.
    - rootw0rm 9y ago
      i can't believe i found something cool in a comments section about Excel.
- phonon 9y ago
  This looks similar https://github.com/dgorissen/pycel https://github.com/dgorissen/pycel or perhaps https://github.com/xuri/efp https://github.com/xuri/efp
anakic 9y ago
I'll join in with a bit of show-and-tell of my own, if I may. I'm working on a plugin for Excel for dev's and other technical people. It lets the user use SQL and C# in Excel, connect to various types of databases and move data in either direction, and provides a runtime for automation. The idea is basically to let tech users use their existing skills to make life easier. Main areas of use are: - process (live) data in Excel via SQL and C#/linq - move data between Excel and databases - fetch data from various sources using .net (e.g. get data from a AD, file system, REST etc. in a few lines of code) - replace VBA with C# and .NET for automation It's also very useful for prototyping. Business logic goes inside C# scripts, and Excel takes care of user input, displaying results, data binding (formulas and graphs) and data storage. It's commercial but freemium, the url is http://www.querystorm.com http://www.querystorm.com. I posted about it a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11583488 Here's an intro video: https://vimeo.com/242216594 https://vimeo.com/242216594
- 0x445442 9y ago
  Yeah, I've always thought with the types of integration hooks you're talking about that Excel could serve as a front end for many enterprise/back office apps. My first heavy use of Excel was in a thermodynamics class in college. We modeled heat gradients for various HVAC systems with Excel. After that, I used it to calculate stresses and strains of different structures using each cell as a node in finite element analysis model.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  I did something like this in 2002 for a VFX house; but it was loading a DLL that hot loaded other DLLs, queried the routines and exposed them as Excel functions. Through that I pulled in a stochastic modeling framework I wrote, and pulled in 5 years of the studio's timecard records to create a production forecasting system, right down to selecting the correct staff for each position, with backup people, for 1200 digital artists. The Excel "spreadheet" was something like 250 MB when saved with a film production in it.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
osullivj 9y ago
Interesting: optimized for integration is what I've been doing too. If you've got a minute to take a look at the links in my profile I'd be keen to hear your feedback.

GiorgioG 9y ago

When I consulted at a health insurance company (a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee with 1000 employees, 200 IT staff) about 10 years ago, I was absolutely horrified that the system of record for health care plan data was Excel spreadsheets. They had staff who would update the claims processing system based on thousands of spreadsheets. When you called customer service, the CSR app would auto-open the member's plan information XLS file to the CSR rep. It got the job done - but it was the wrong tool for the job. We recommended they implement a PDM (product data management) system - it would have saved them millions of dollars (considering they had a staff of 20 whose sole job was to update the claims processing system by hand based on these spreadsheets.) Unfortunately when the 2008 financial crisis happened, management balked at the initial outlay. It's quite possible they're still using Excel to this day.

dalbasal 9y ago
There are upsides to excel in cases like that… The health insurance people of various sorts who use this setup are the ones with domain knowledge. With an excel program, they can (1) understand how it works (2) add to it, modify it (3) create a copy and break it (4) debug it (5) have ideas about how it could work differently… I’m not saying that excel is the tool for the job (sounds like it is definitely not), and those advantages erode as the setup gets more complex and/or has more people using it. But, there are reasons excel gets used this way. The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs. I’m going to repeat again that I am not advocating health insurance companies run policies and claims in excel. It is a bad idea, almost certainly. I am saying that we should be curious at why they are doing it this way. I think it’s a “good” question in that it leads to interesting places. If the excel team was blessed with a plague of inspiration tomorrow morning, Is there a way they could make it so that excel is the right way to manage an insurance business?
- GiorgioG 9y ago
  > The alternative is often rough. Software projects like this have high failure rates. Getting “requirements” out of users’/clients’ heads and into programmer’s is difficult. It means the standard (natural?) gap between domain knowledge and programming knowledge is restored. That has costs. The alternative doesn't have to have a high failure rate. I was brought in to help reboot their in-house implementation of a product data management system - the core issue was they didn't have any real competency in software development (though they believed they did.) Ultimately I recommended they abandon the in-house effort and instead proposed using an off-the-shelf PDM system, we evaluated quite a few decent options over the course of six months and found several that met the business's requirements. It would have been the right thing to do and I believe it would have been successful. Culturally the IT department staff was plagued with not-invented-here syndrome. It was a generally dysfunctional IT group and it's quite likely that Excel got it's start as the system of record because the business needed to get the job done, and the IT department was unable or unwilling to deliver.

avar 9y ago

Since PowerPoint was proven to be Turing complete my bet is on it and not Excel being the most commonly used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

jasongill 9y ago
PowerPoint, while popular, has no where near the widespread use of Excel. In most businesses, PowerPoint is the sort of thing you use once a month, once a week maybe if you are doing a lot of meetings. Excel gets used daily or even hourly by members of almost every department in businesses large and small. I would agree with OP that Excel is the most-used programming environment of all time

ransom1538 9y ago

You can do crazy shit in excel. After someone opens an excel sheet - download a webpage and save it to disk? no problem. Lets load other excel files in memory and run their scripts too! Don't worry about your computer fan - while we scan your disk for stuff. Just state "On Error Resume Next" and start scanning hardware. Company email accounts are stuffed with one off sketchy excel attachments. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-download-webpage-complete https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27419804/vba-excel-downl...

lukateake 9y ago
When you put it like that, ransom1538, I'm not going to click the link!
tinus_hn 9y ago
The idea is that general Excel files do not run macros. They need to be saved with a special extension and you need to manually approve macros, with warnings if the file is in a location where other users can write to the file. I have no idea how watertight this is though, it’s Microsoft quality (and some of the most ancient code they have) so I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

ajlburke 9y ago

I used to be a Lotus Notes specialist, and one interesting thing I noticed is that from the earliest versions it was designed specifically to be a "step up" from a spreadsheet (Lotus of course also made Lotus 1-2-3, which was the original killer-app spreadsheet before Excel took over). Notes still let you see data as rows and columns and had very spreadsheet-like functions, many of which could be transferred directly from Lotus 1-2-3 - but it was a full client-server system which supported decentralized replication, built-in messaging and email, and a solid security model (yes yes I know it was also a crazy confused mess and a UI nightmare but that's a different topic). Back in the day, organizations had teams going around finding the most useful ad-hoc spreadsheets and converting them into simple Lotus Notes databases. Other organizations would sometimes also give staff training in building simple Notes databases - not a whole lot more difficult than doing a spreadsheet - and then have expert teams come in and polish them up as needed. This made business software bottom-up rather than top-down, which turned out to be a whole lot more useful in a lot of cases. In many ways, even after I left the Notes world for PHP and Rails and JS, my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications. Spreadsheets are the 'blue-green algae' of the software world: the simple base level that's everywhere and surprisingly essential.

deleted 9y ago
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sheetjs 9y ago
> my career in business software has still mostly been about converting spreadsheets into more "proper" applications. Still true for many people in 2017. @patio11 probably said it best: > Every spreadsheet shared in a business is an angel announcing another SaaS app still needs to be built. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657 FWIW we ended up in business software after one of our open source libraries to read and write spreadsheets (https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, demo http://oss.sheetjs.com/ http://oss.sheetjs.com/) ended up garnering lots of demand from businesses looking to build those "proper" applications
- 9y ago

rb808 9y ago

Functional programming before it was fashionable!

mabbo 9y ago
This is how I like to explain functional programming to developers today. When you say "Functional Programming", a lot of devs think "scary complicated thing". When you say "Basic excel spreadsheets" they go "anyone can do that!".
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Excel is a very limited form of functional programming. It's sort of SIMD and it eschews side effects, but it has no first class functions which is extremely frustrated and -non-functional
  - TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    Perhaps a better term is declarative?

sheetjs 9y ago

Excel is simultaneously flexible enough to solve a wide array of problems and structured enough to enable larger tasks like slicing and filtering data. This article is trying to push for cloud-based silos that solve specific problems, but most of them fall apart in "real-world" scenarios because they aren't flexible enough to support the ad-hoc workflows people have developed over years.

otakucode 9y ago
The dystopia that I fear is an endless gauntlet of powerless employees droning 'the computer doesn't have a field for that' or 'the computer won't let me do that'. We already seem perilously close to this, putting the consistency of systems ostensibly built to serve the needs of society over and above the needs of society.

tomrod 9y ago

Completely agree. I think simply enforcing a version control would be sufficient to solve most Excel woes, however. It doesn't solve manual user error (a la Reinhart-Rogoff), but it's a good next step.

phkahler 9y ago

MS access is often a way better tool for what people do. The problem is that it requires a bit more work up front, a little more abstraction, and usually some programming. Having said that, most companies have people in IT that can help out something like that together for people but that's not their job.

toyg 9y ago
> it requires a bit more work up front Because of this "bit more work", it's also much less flexible in the long run. Excel is not a great database, but it's a highly flexible one.
deleted 9y ago
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fjsolwmv 9y ago
Does access have a spreadsheet view for bulk editing?
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Yes, it’s called the datasheet view.
  - TakerofVita 9y ago
    Access does have a datasheet view, but it is _much_ less powerful than Excel e.g. copy/paste multiple cells, fill down, and it is SLOWER.
    - phkahler 9y ago
      In a database you don't "fill down". You build a query to generate what you want (enter the expressions once) and click on the "data sheet" view for the query. It's different, but the simplicity of referencing $A$5 in excel and using whatever cells you want as inputs is way simpler than any way you might take user inputs in Access.

wpietri 9y ago

I definitely agree that spreadsheets (of which Excel is just the latest) have drawn a lot of people into basic programming. But at the same time, it has stunted a lot of people's growth because of its sharp limitations. Spreadsheets have a lot of similarities to the sort of code bases that as an industry we've been moving away from. E.g., no version control, no tests, opaque code, bugs are hard to find, write-only code, bit rot, random antique scripts used in critical spots, poor reusability, latest version is on somebody's hard drive somewhere, nobody knows which version is the right one. I also think it's deeply unfortunate that there's no good path from spreadsheet master to real developer. As great as spreadsheets are, they're a cul de sac. I hope this new generation of tools fixes that. If not, somebody sure should.

sliverstorm 9y ago

I agree that mission critical data needs to get out of it and into a centralized system, but I still feel Excel is an incredible tool in any business. You would have thought this would be obvious- it seems analogous to perl/python or other such Swiss army knife tools we use for quick one-off solutions that occasionally get pressed into permanent formal use where they shouldn't.

kazagistar 9y ago
Python (and probably Perl too) work fine for permanent formal use as long as they are engineered as such. I have seen clear, well structured permanent code bases in python. The problem is just that people like coding one off prototypes in python, and those end up in prod; it's just as bad as when Java prototypes end up in prod, but who actually wants to write prototypes in Java, if given the choice?
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Couldn't you argue the same thing about excel? It does not lend itself to well engineered permanent formal use, but you certainly could build a robust system with it.

bognition 9y ago

The issue isn't that you can't program in excel the issue is that excel lacks many of the safeguards that have been built around programming in the last few years. Version control for excel is terrible at best. Code review is basically non-existent and how could it be when logic is split over several cells and variables are named $A17 or B23. I think the win with excel is its super simple interface, that said there is plenty of room to improve on the programming language interface.

com2kid 9y ago
> variables are named $A17 or B23. Excel lets you name tables, cell ranges, or individual cells. I have seen spreadsheets put together by people who take the time to do this, and they are remarkably readable!
- bognition 9y ago
  TIL, thanks for letting me know
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Way back before they added visual basic into it Excel had what was called a Macro language that was also built in sheets - just slightly different appearance (very wide cells) and altered functionality (to prevent you from doing numerical operations to your macro code). I think this was around version 4? Anyway, it basically worked like a stack, with the currently selected cell being the instruction pointer. So when debugging you could either look at your data and watch blocks of numbers flashing in and out of existence or changing state, or look at the macro sheet and watch the pointer bounce around as it went to different branches or sat in loops or whatever. There were commands to turn screen updates on and off (which sped things up considerably) so as you got more and more of it working it would go from looking like some confusing nightmare to a smooth list of progress bars and passed sanity checks. They moved to VBS because programmers were finding the cell model too restrictive/weird, and for integration with Access, but doing it all in cells was remarkably and pleasantly like assembly-level debugging. You'd hack something up quickly, figure out your algorithm, then name the ranges and use and index value, and you could lock ranges and what-all else. It wasn't as easy to read as a page of code (eg no whitespace) but the crudity of it pushed you towards that sort of 1-operation-per-line discipline that assembler demands and really forced you to think about semantic efficiency. I had macros consisting of thousands of cells of code with every single operation commented. You could, in turn, name the ranges that had macro code in them and do code profiling to find out where your performance bottlenecks were, and so on.

Robotbeat 9y ago

Completely agree. It's common to tell kids (and everyone) that they need to "learn to code." That is what Excel already is! And it's incredibly powerful, especially if you don't have any other coding skills. But, of course, it's messy. When tens of millions of people can each write their own programs and easily modify them and change them to suit their own needs without needing to recompile or anything, then you get the mess which is Excel. ...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!). But that's fine. Give humans tools, and they'll find clever ways of using them that you don't intend. And it'll continue to drive people crazy. In some ways, the Excel hate (though obviously not unfounded) seems almost kind of like a bourgeoisie elitism. THIS is what it looks like when you give everyone the ability to code!

DougWebb 9y ago
...and, in fact, that's also what you'd get if you taught everyone how to program Python in high school instead of Excel. You'd get tens of millions of non-interoperable messes of programs (which still get the job done!). That's exactly what happened with Perl when everyone learned to use, modify, and develop CGI scripts in the early days of web-based application development. Dynamically-generated website content worked and evolved into the web we know today, but those scripts were awful and did a lot of harm to Perl's reputation.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I personally think that a lot of notoriety from Perl stemmed from insane overuse of regular expressions. I'm not talking simple and concise expressions doing ordinary useful things, but rather insanely long and intricate ones which one had to be at a god-expert-level on regex just to attempt to understand. These kinds of expressions are what ultimately caused the derisive terming of Perl as "line noise". It was really unfair, to say the least, because there were plenty of ways to code in Perl and do so cleanly, with a minimal usage of regex. Honestly, it seemed more like people were coding in regular expressions, and simply using Perl as a "run-time" wrapper for those expressions (and maybe those expressions existed first; I don't know). I'm not the greatest fan of regular expressions (to me - especially on more complex operations - it is almost like programming the tape of a Turing machine), but I do know they have their place in the world. However, because the "language" (if you will) of regex allows for an extreme number of operations and such, it almost succumbs to an "inner platform effect", allowing those with familiarity to roam free, to the detriment of future maintainers. That said - none of this is new. If you go back to the beginning of microcomputing, you'll find the same thing happened with the various dialects of BASIC, as people self-taught themselves programming in that language, then spread the knowledge thru various means (magazines, books, and later bbs systems) - it became a horrible mess, even though it all pretty much "worked".

mark-r 9y ago

Excel is the Swiss Army Knife application - it isn't the best tool, but it's the most versatile and the one you have with you. Good insight about the relation to programming.

poimpoij8878 9y ago

Jupyter notebooks are the new Excel

gordonguthrie 9y ago

https://vimeo.com/42266454 https://vimeo.com/42266454

osteele 9y ago

"The dynamic spreadsheet is a good example of such a tissuelike superobject. It is a simulation kit, and it provides a remarkable degree of direct leverage. Spreadsheets at their best combine the genres established in the 1970s (objects, windows, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing and goal-seeking retrieval) into a “better old thing” that is likely to be one of the “almost new things” for the mainstream designs of the next few years. "A spreadsheet is an aggregate of concurrently active objects, usually organized into a rectangular array of cells similar to the paper spreadsheet used by an accountant. […] A spreadsheet is a simulated pocket universe that continuously maintains its fabric; it is a kit for a surprising range of applications.” – Alan Kay, “Computer Software”, Scientific American (1984). pp. 56–57. PDF: https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-computer-software-sciam-sept-84.pdf https://frameworker.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/alan-kay-com... Republished as “Computer Software” (1984). pp. 6–7. PDF: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/130/Alan%20Kay%20-%20ComputerSoftware-SA.pdf http://home.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/130/Alan%20Kay%20-...

8ytecoder 9y ago

Excel totally totally missed the wonderful opportunity to do so much better than Google Spreadsheets. They could have created a centralized shared way of creating, editing, sharing and storing data. Their limitations as it exists today are ludicrous at best - 10 max users? Give companies a way to keep the data in a centrally managed place with access control and auditing and users the ability to freely share their creations (and data)...

samstave 9y ago

I think that excel is one of the best applications on the market. Every single department in any company can benefit from knowing it well. The problem is getting people comfortable and competent to know it well. This is where I think google sheets fucking failed: they should have made an effort to make sure every single gmail user had a tutorial to know how to empower their curiosities and interests via google sheets.

kakwa_ 9y ago

Excel remains a tool. It can be a really powerful one I agree. It's simple to use, a lot of people knows how to handle it. And it's probably one of the best tools to do some quick data analysis. However, like every tool, it has its pros & cons. One of the main cons, IMHO, is that data tends to be mixed with processing a lot (but it also simplify usage, so...). Overall spreadsheets have been really helpful. Retrospectively, there is a good reason why it triggered the personal computers boom in the 80ies. They are good adhoc tools that can help lot. And Excel is the dominant one. However, there are tons of horror stories around Excel, worst case scenario, it has lead to wrong decisions affecting the world economy. I've personally a few horror stories (fortunately, not affecting the world economy). At my last job, we used an internal spreadsheet to evaluate costs and margins when answering contract bids. This spreadsheet was a monstrosity taking ages to compute and it was a nightmare to manage, sync, and share between all the participants. I've also seen the traditional "on what did you work last week" spreadsheet, quite annoying to update, even more given that my workstation is under Linux... I've also seen spreadsheets as specification documents, generating an xml file, which in turn, through some xslt, was used to generate C++/C++ headers files describing an interface between two sub-systems. The concept (automating spec to code translation) was really interesting. However, I don't know about you, but I personally hate to have MS Office in the tool chain used to compile a piece of software, specially when it targets Linux and only Linux... But those are not the most terrifying spreadsheets I've seen. The most terrifying on was a giant spreadsheet basically managing every aspects of a huge project (thousands of piece of equipment, hundreds of sites). This document was so big it took several hours just to open it. It was like a giant CMDB of all the configuration items, and, trust me there were a lot. But it also did more, a lot more. It was generating configuration files for applications, background images for monitoring maps, firewall rules... It was also a tool that helped architect and size the number of equipment required for a given site. I probably don't know the full extent of its functionalities. Just to give you an idea of its complexity, at one point, even the number of cells in a whole excel document was reached (with Office 2003 however). All the auto-generated stuff were always kind of wrong and had to be fixed by hand, which made for a repetitive, annoying and error prone process. Also, there was no clear naming convention, and it was a mess to take the generated stuff and load it in our automation scripts. It was, de-facto, a huge piece of software with no versioning, tests or QA and it showed. There was only one guy behind it, basically managing the beast full time. When he was sick or on PTO, the whole project was impacted. And when he left, it was a huge mess, nobody was able to take over. Spreadsheets are great, but past an adhoc usage, please, please, please, implement something more serious. And also, keep track of Excel usage to avoid these kinds of monsters. Often there are real needs behind these beasts, but Excel is a really horrible choice in the long run. Related commitstrip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-beast/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/12/19/the-coder-and-the-b...

beached_whale 9y ago

Many of the larger businesses I have seen(not too many) have a disconnect between the subject matter experts that use Excel to codify their knowledge and the developers. The program(Excel workbook) often isn't big enough to warrant the dev costs when it works "now" but is too important not to in the long run. I do think this is a tooling issue that could generate code based on Excel workbooks.

eighthnate 9y ago

> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. I wouldn't say Excel is a programming language - unless you are referring to VBA attached to excel. Excel is a spreadsheet application. It's no more a programming language than Microsoft Word is a programming language.

mpweiher 9y ago

> reactive data programming model Can we say "one way dataflow constraint system"? They're even called "spreadsheet constraints"...

rukuu001 9y ago

I found this just the other day: A User-Centred Approach to Functions in Excel [PDF][2003]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/excel.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

arthurjj 9y ago

> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. Anytime another programmer asks me what language they should learn I tell them Excel and they think I'm joking. Besides being a quick and dirty way to solve a variety of problems it helps you speak in the language of your users (if you work in B2B)

tomc1985 9y ago

Honestly the article stinks like an advertorial of cloud vendors trying to push their wares. I agree that Excel isn't a good fit for many things, but blanket rules like 'no excel' seem counterproductive. Why do we readers take these sorts of things at face value? You know the whole article is a sales pitch.

emacsgifs 9y ago
I suppose you either understand how PR works and simply disregard anything printed or broadcast and do your own research, and accept this system unlikely to change... Or you get irritated by it, while waiting for the "inevitable" collapse of this promotional/propaganda model... Honestly I don't know what is happening, but it seemed like the first option, which I've followed for a couple of decades is a good enough cure for disillusionment and depression. (Caused by investing in the second option) Edit: add quotes to inevitable.

jsemrau 9y ago

Agreed! The business critical solutions (!) you can build quickly with Excel that even non-technical people can understand is the real MVP.

vba 9y ago

M$ft XL developer here. I attended a conference to meet our Excel guru users and it's fairly impressive what these non-coders achieve. Excel is like an operating system to them, and they even create Excel files to "debug" there other Excel files, e.g. debugging the order of formula calculation and validating the output at each step in their property assets spreadsheets - without using any VBA

spynxic 9y ago

"[Excel's non-VBA interface is] a brilliant reactive data programming model.." Also known as functional programming

hden 9y ago

> I would argue that the most commonly used programming language is Excel. But few of the people using it realize they're programming. Indeed, I'd also argue that the most commonly used database is Excel. Although few people using it realize they're designing schema.

mr_toad 9y ago

Every excel spreadsheet is an error waiting to happen. Implicit & unexplained business rules, no tests, no version control, unlabeled cell references, hardwired variables, everything is global, no encapsulation, no logs and no documentation. Even assembly code is easier read and maintain than a complicated excel workbook.

_diyu 9y ago

> few of the people using it realize they're programming An idea I've been toying with for a few months now is an automation app (read: window manager) whose UI is somewhere between Excel and GameMaker Studio's drag & drop UI. Like where you just have a giant grid/canvas, and where you can define "routines" and "variables" as groups of cells. If I could figure it out, I think it would open up the idea of an automation app to a broader scope, to people who aren't programmers, and I might be able to make some money off it. Especially considering I made like $500 in donations for Hydra back when I was doing more WM stuff for Mac, so there seems to be some excitement for the idea of programming your Mac, but perhaps it could be a living if I can figure out how to reach out to power users who aren't programmers. And it was your comment that gave me the idea of making it more like a grid instead of more like GameMaker. So, thanks!

azernik 9y ago

I agree - it's also really useful as a prototyping language, since its accessibility allows domain experts to really make something that suits their workflow. My current company (Parsley, www.parsleycooks.com) would have been a lot harder to do without looking at the Excel sheets that the more tech-savvy and organized chefs use for logistics work.

rhelmer 9y ago

In the book "A Small Matter of Programming"[0] (1993), Bonnie A. Nardi makes the case that there are really only two successful end user programming systems - spreadsheets and CAD. I think that's just as true today, at least as far as business software goes. 0 - https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/small-matter-programming

eru 9y ago

Compare "Improving the world’s most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improving-worlds-popular-functional-language-user-defined-functions-excel/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/improvi...

thanatropism 9y ago
UDFs are the real LPT. Much of gnarly spreadsheeting going around has to do with having to simulate loops with rows or just partition very large formulas (think option pricing formulas) into partial result cells.
- eru 9y ago
  Could you explain your first sentence? The acronyms are a bit dense. Edit: UDF is user defined functions. What's LPT?