3 ms·

Would you consider Microsoft Excel a visual language?

by _wmd 8y ago

the_duke 8y ago
Excel is an interesting case. I think it sits between both worlds. The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual. This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity. Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.
hliyan 8y ago
Excel is cartesian, which is hardly 'graphical'. There are virtually no superfluous graphical detail (e.g. placement of shapes, arrows, thickness etc.) -- the only part of the flexgrid that has semantic meaning is the row and column reference.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  Giving meaning to coordinates in a 2D chart makes it a graphical language. It certainly is different from conventional languages, which use a tree metaphor (nested expressions) and a linear syntax (everything is considered a long stream of text to be parsed). Using rows and columns instead of code blocks helps a great deal in reducing the cognitive load of having to address every part of the language through an ID, either for variables of functions. Not to mention intermixing code and data values, which is not considered part of conventional languages (though is common in interactive debugging sessions, which are typically considered "visual" debugging).
6nf 8y ago
I'm going to say 'yes'. It's a good question and I think Excel qualifies even though in normal use Excel shows the data but not really the logic / formulas etc.
- _wmd 8y ago
  Excel succeeds at its job so thoroughly that I think people fail to realize (or cope with the realization) that spreadsheets are probably the most successful democratized programming environment we have. It may not have been intentional, but the 2D grid representation for data interlaced with an acyclic dependency graph is by far superior to any alternative representation, visual or otherwise, I can think of for either of those concepts. Users don't even think about graphs or data, often they don't even understand those terms. Due to this IMHO spreadsheets are pretty much peak computer science

Would you consider Microsoft Excel a visual language?

by _wmd 8y ago

Would you consider Microsoft Excel a visual language?

Excel is an interesting case. I think it sits between both worlds. The interface and main interaction is visual, yet the actual logic is textual. This seems to hit the sweet spot, making it useful for the non-programmer yet providing significant depth and complexity. Note that personally I hate using plain Excel because the formulas seem so restrictive and the functions I want are never there, but again this seems to be ideal for the target audience.

hliyan 8y ago

Excel is cartesian, which is hardly 'graphical'. There are virtually no superfluous graphical detail (e.g. placement of shapes, arrows, thickness etc.) -- the only part of the flexgrid that has semantic meaning is the row and column reference.

TuringTest 8y ago
Giving meaning to coordinates in a 2D chart makes it a graphical language. It certainly is different from conventional languages, which use a tree metaphor (nested expressions) and a linear syntax (everything is considered a long stream of text to be parsed). Using rows and columns instead of code blocks helps a great deal in reducing the cognitive load of having to address every part of the language through an ID, either for variables of functions. Not to mention intermixing code and data values, which is not considered part of conventional languages (though is common in interactive debugging sessions, which are typically considered "visual" debugging).

6nf 8y ago

I'm going to say 'yes'. It's a good question and I think Excel qualifies even though in normal use Excel shows the data but not really the logic / formulas etc.

_wmd 8y ago
Excel succeeds at its job so thoroughly that I think people fail to realize (or cope with the realization) that spreadsheets are probably the most successful democratized programming environment we have. It may not have been intentional, but the 2D grid representation for data interlaced with an acyclic dependency graph is by far superior to any alternative representation, visual or otherwise, I can think of for either of those concepts. Users don't even think about graphs or data, often they don't even understand those terms. Due to this IMHO spreadsheets are pretty much peak computer science