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Have you ever worked outside of a start up with engineers at a fortune 500 company? Excel is crack for engineers.
by jccodez 14y ago
Have you ever worked outside of a start up with engineers at a fortune 500 company? Excel is crack for engineers.
- thirsteh 14y agoExcel is an easy-to-use functional programming language.
- nandemo 14y agoReminds of this paper by Simon Peyton-Jones at al.: Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/excel/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...
- Evbn 14y agoThat was kind of a PR gimmick. Excel is declarative, but misses a lot of functional. For example, first class functions.
- gruseom 14y agoCan you imagine a spreadsheet with first-class functions, and possibly other functional features? What would such a thing look like? Strictly speaking, Excel doesn't have functions at all, let alone first-class, since you can't define a new function using only cells and formulas. You have to go to VBA.
- keithalewis 14y agoLike this: http://xllfunctional.codeplex.com/ http://xllfunctional.codeplex.com/. Not easy to use at all, but it is possible. Barely.
- jccodez 14y agovba?
- bgilroy26 14y agoI think thirsteh was talking about the big models that operate at the spreadsheet layer, without VBA. VBA is imperative, but when you chain worksheet functions together, you have a more explicit, more visible way of manipulating data the way you might with a functional programming language.
- thirsteh 14y agoIndeed. Some people have even used e.g. Haskell to provide more "real" logic, but with Excel as the user interface: http://qconlondon.com/london-2008/speaker/Lennart+Augustsson http://qconlondon.com/london-2008/speaker/Lennart+Augustsson http://urchin.earth.li/~ganesh/icfp08.pdf http://urchin.earth.li/~ganesh/icfp08.pdf
- bgilroy26 14y agoThese are cool! Thank you!