Ask HN: Language compiled to Excel spreadsheets?

Link to thread from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935357

For non-technical people whose tasks have reached the limit of what can easily be maintained in Excel, it seems like you need the opposite as well--call it a spreadsheet decompiler, which outputs this hypothetical declarative DSL.

Alice in accounting maintains a set of spreadsheets for a number of years, and finally the task of adding some new feature, or porting it to a batch system in some production line-of-business system falls to Bob, a developer. Bob runs Alice's spreadsheet through the decompiler, spends some time refactoring it by adding descriptive names to some of the "variables," building tests, and generally structuring it for extensability and maintenance. Now he can compile it back to Excel and send it back to Alice and others that need it, or (and this is the really cool part), deploy as just another module in the ordinary business automation.

You've basically built a way to turn a spreadsheet hacked together by a domain expert and a small number of development man-hours into something much move valuable and maintainable.

I don't know much about enterprise-y reporting software, but it seems that if you built this, with the right integrations, you could probably sell quite a few copies of it, plus some high-buck support contracts.

A programming language that is as easy to write as Excel formulas exists already: It's called BASIC. Lots of people fell in love with it since the late 70's. Sure it's often ridiculed, mostly by people who somehow manage to slide an ill-fitting and unwarranted Djikstra quote in their argument, but the language has evolved with the times and once enabled millions of programmers to earn a respectable and honest living. Dialects like FreeBASIC, QB64, DARKBASIC, XOJO, FNX Basic, AutoIT and GAMBAS may seem very different to one another, but they remain BASIC and easy enough to learn within a week. Communities still flourish and are very tightly knit. Source code, Modules and Libraries are abundant, as are very capable IDEs, together with complete documentation.

Go forth(cough) and give FreeBASIC a try for a start. It already runs faster than Python ever will on Linux, DOS32 and Windows. QB64 is cross-platfrom too. If you're on the move give RFO BASIC a try, when you get back to your regular PC you can make APKs of the programs you've designed on your tablet. B4J enables you to run your programs on the Java VM. And if they are still not enough, you can still write your own dialect of BASIC... in BASIC!!!

There might be some merit to this in very specific use cases but I suppose for those use cases you might be better off using a language / environment such as Python or R anyway.

I know quite a few heavy Excel users (mostly of the MBA variety). They sometimes accomplish astonishing feats with Excel. They're skilled and knowledgeable problem-solvers but they're not very likely to touch a programming environment other than Excel.

The reason for this presumably is that spreadsheets and Microsoft Excel in particular have hit a sweet spot of an IDE that sort of covers many common business use cases while still being easy enough to use and getting started with for an intelligent person who knows nothing about programming at first. Spreadsheets are also a very visual environment compared to a text-based programming language.

So, yes there's lots to improved about handling spreadsheets, making them more testable and scalable but the core - the spreadsheet development environment if you will - isn't going anywhere. At least I can't see too many people (especially the MBA kind) using a declarative language instead of Excel.

I absolutely agree. My first experience was with QuickBASIC in the late 90s. I don't remember how I got my hands on it, but it was remarkably easy to pick up for a 10 year old with no programming experience and no one else in the house to answer questions. It was clearly designed with a quick feedback loop and small barriers to entry in mind.