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The “Build Systems a la Carte” paper famously compares Excel with build systems such as Make and Bazel. Recalculating a spreadsheet efficiently is the same problem as compiling source code.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...

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Yes, or (in this case?) interpreting it. I think of spreadsheets as visual functional programming environments. The humble spreadsheet has an interesting kinship with the most trendy, and, for some (me!), difficult-to-grok programming paradigm.

YES! This is exactly how I see it. I feel like I'm in this weird intersection of people who've spent A LOT of time in Excel and also significant time in programming to feel this way about spreadsheets but I don't know who else to talk to..

I tried making the same point on reddit the other day

https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/jpb2ud/edit_a_spread...

The soon-to-come LET function agrees :)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-3484...

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft

That's awesome. So you basically allow implicit creation of off-spreadsheet named cells (sub-cells, in a sense, as they're only locally available). Very useful.

See also "Spreadsheets: Functional Programming for the Masses" by Simon Peyton-Jones et al.

This is an interesting paper - thanks for linking!

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