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Excel makes programming easy because all of the intermediate values are visible left to right and the loop iterations are visible top to bottom. This makes it e

Excel makes programming easy because all of the intermediate values are visible left to right and the loop iterations are visible top to bottom. This makes it easy to iterate towards a solution by visual inspection, but also creates spreadsheets as buggy as you’d expect if you only tested by visual inspection.

WorldMaker 5y ago
Sounds like you've never seen advanced Accounting spreadsheets because Excel definitely does not have left-to-right/top-to-bottom or even intermediate values restrictions. There are some amazing Gordian knots people have programmed in Excel. You haven't really seen the horrors of programming in Excel until you've needed to use the "Formula Auditing" group of the Formulas tab in the Excel ribbon. Admittedly "Trace Dependents" and "Trace Precedents" are still rather more visual tools than their source code equivalents, but they are their own sort of fun.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  I share your pain and have seen people doing everything from numerical integration to curve fitting in Excel, all of it terribly. I worry what new special versions of recursive hell the new lambda functions will unleash upon us.
Someone 5y ago
That’s true for only a subset of spreadsheets. There’s no requirement for formulas to work left to right and top to bottom. Also, the moment you write = (A1 + A2)/2, not all intermediate values are visible anymore (although Excel has support for temporarily making them visible (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/evaluate-a-nested-formula-one-step-at-a-time-59a201ae-d1dc-4b15-8586-a70aa409b8a7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/evaluate-a-nested...)) Also, in my experience, it’s fairly normal to have hidden rows or columns (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-show-rows-or-columns-659c2cad-802e-44ee-a614-dde8443579f8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-show-rows...) or hide entire sheets (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-unhide-worksheets-69f2701a-21f5-4186-87d7-341a8cf53344 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-unhide-wo...) And of course, the ultimate “not all intermediate values are visible” is the use of macro functions or iterations (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-formula-recalculation-iteration-or-precision-in-excel-73fc7dac-91cf-4d36-86e8-67124f6bcce4 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-formula-re...)

WorldMaker 5y ago

Sounds like you've never seen advanced Accounting spreadsheets because Excel definitely does not have left-to-right/top-to-bottom or even intermediate values restrictions. There are some amazing Gordian knots people have programmed in Excel. You haven't really seen the horrors of programming in Excel until you've needed to use the "Formula Auditing" group of the Formulas tab in the Excel ribbon. Admittedly "Trace Dependents" and "Trace Precedents" are still rather more visual tools than their source code equivalents, but they are their own sort of fun.

azalemeth 5y ago
I share your pain and have seen people doing everything from numerical integration to curve fitting in Excel, all of it terribly. I worry what new special versions of recursive hell the new lambda functions will unleash upon us.

Someone 5y ago

That’s true for only a subset of spreadsheets. There’s no requirement for formulas to work left to right and top to bottom. Also, the moment you write = (A1 + A2)/2, not all intermediate values are visible anymore (although Excel has support for temporarily making them visible (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/evaluate-a-nested-formula-one-step-at-a-time-59a201ae-d1dc-4b15-8586-a70aa409b8a7 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/evaluate-a-nested...)) Also, in my experience, it’s fairly normal to have hidden rows or columns (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-show-rows-or-columns-659c2cad-802e-44ee-a614-dde8443579f8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-show-rows...) or hide entire sheets (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-unhide-worksheets-69f2701a-21f5-4186-87d7-341a8cf53344 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/hide-or-unhide-wo...) And of course, the ultimate “not all intermediate values are visible” is the use of macro functions or iterations (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-formula-recalculation-iteration-or-precision-in-excel-73fc7dac-91cf-4d36-86e8-67124f6bcce4 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-formula-re...)