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You could make that same argument for any parallelism - your CPU queues some inputs and processes them in an arbitrary order after considering dependencies. Th

You could make that same argument for any parallelism - your CPU queues some inputs and processes them in an arbitrary order after considering dependencies. There's a long way between hand-writing CPU instructions to make sure it does the same thing between runs, and the other extreme of writing a terraform yaml config and letting the engine decide how to get there. Excel is so far from SQL/YAML that I can't lump them all together as "declarative". "Column from examples" comes to mind as a more declarative Excel feature than formulas in general.

naasking 2y ago
> You could make that same argument for any parallelism - your CPU queues some inputs and processes them in an arbitrary order after considering dependencies. No, the CPU instructions are explicitly sequenced. The fact that the CPU can sometimes execute them out of order doesn't change this basic fact. Excel is absolutely declarative in its core form. Of course the scripting languages that are embedded can change that, but it's 100% declarative if you don't use that part of it. A = B + C in Excel is not a calculation or assignment operation, it's declaring a relation between those variables that Excel preserves how it sees fit.