Excel Unusual – Science, Engineering, Games in Excel and VBA | Hacker News Reader

Excel Unusual – Science, Engineering, Games in Excel and VBA

excelunusual.com

48 pointssigna118 comments

When I was in college I took a class on computational physics, and the professor had us solving boundary value problems in excel. Then we implemented the same programs in C and Fortran. That's when I understood that Excel is a programming language, which really has some implications as far as programming languages go. If Excel is a programming language, that makes it the most used programming language in the world by far. And if that's the case, then reactive programming is the dominant programming paradigm, not imperative programming as developers would have you believe.

Excel is an IDE with a function programming language attached.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

I wouldn't really call it a functional programming language, as it's quite data centric and operations are encouraged over arrays and tables. Writing functional code is often an exercise of composing functions; whereas in Excel you might compose functions, but your job as a programmer is mostly entering data and defining operations over them. Reactivity is a very important aspect of the whole thing that's missing from most functional programming languages. To reduce Excel to functional programming is to boil away its essence.

Edit: Watching more of the linked talk, it's pretty much making the point I am except some of the terms she uses are not the ones I would use. The speaker defined "functional programming" as programming without assignment statements, which if we are to accept we must then conclude that Prolog is a functional programming language.

Also insofar as she says Excel is a pure functional programming language, she means that the language has pure functions. She's not saying it has all the other features of Haskell like static typing even though her graphic kind of implied it.

When you have the skills to design pretty 2D graphics and functional games, and you decide to do it in Excel, just because. Hacking in essence.

...just because people can't install quake on their locked down corporate greybox nightmare rectangle they are forced to stare at all day while wearing something approximating a suit while being constantly bullied and a cool hack is to take the supplied corporate greybox software and hack it into a game you can share via email with fellow humans at the bottom of the glass tower caste-system.

At least that, along with a total and passionate refusal to "just print out and enter the data with the keyboard" is why I learned to program and chose excel VBA a couple of decades back. Then came a redhat CD on the cover of a magazine because windows95 sucked so badly I was willing to try anything else, but that's another chapter... We've all got our origin stories!! :-)

Excel Unusual – home of the most unique Microsoft Excel animated spreadsheets - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430265 - June 2018 (27 comments)

The Youtube algo seems to have decided that it is time to promote this again. I just got a Youtube recommendation for the rollercoaster animation today. Before submitting it to HN I found that it was submitted yesterday already.

> Excel is cheap and and you can find it everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com