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3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

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Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#21

Post by infogulch »

billrobertson42 wrote: post #4

Excel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.

If Excel had just a couple more features it could be much more ergonomic and not even need macros. Specifically: anonymous functions/lambdas made with just pure formulas. Define a function in a cell like `=($s) => [expr]` (or something idc). Call it with `=A1("string arg", B2:B100)` or by name if you name it via named ranges. Functions are obviously a new data type, so you can pass them as parameters to each other or to relevant builtins. It would turn Excel into some kind of hybrid pure functional/spatial language where the code itself is spatial data.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#22

Post by TeMPOraL »

skriticos2 wrote: post #18
MrEldritch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, people keep trying to use it for things . (And no, that reason is not "they're too stupid to learn how to code") And I'm not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to…

For me it usually is "I would like to use some sensible tools, but corporate policy requires me to not do that (because they are not available) - so I have to (ab)use Excel/Office/VBA to get things done." It's not pretty, stable, efficient or really maintainable, but if you are forced to use a hammer.. ps. Excel does some things OK, like drawing pretty graphs on smallish datasets and visualize quick analysis with piv…

Excel-based workflows are definitely brittle, but people learn to be careful with it (you have to, if you want to keep your job).

One big problem it solves for regular people (i.e. not programmers) is this: "our workflow and/or reality of our business changes much faster than the IT department/outside contractors can keep up with".

(The other big, and related, problem is: "our IT department/outside contractors have no clue and don't really even care much about what we actually do or need".)

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#24

Post by rustcharm »

bazooka2th wrote: post #9

"Ok, we're definitively in hell" - C Bel, 2018. This is amazing, computation in Excel is becoming a solid meme. I've got to ask (and I hope this isn't non-PC or some such), but is English the author's first language? Where's he from? I wish that I had Excel so that I could try it out! :) More about the choice of random digits, sin x + cos x, would be nice to read.

I love Excel, and to show how it really is "better" notice nobody does these things in the FOSS spreadsheet wannabees...

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#26

Post by Jonnax »

wiz21c wrote: post #16

A bit off topic, but Excel has many dangerous features. Is there a spreadsheet that is safe to use ? I just know about gnumeric and LO's calc, but I don't know how goo they are (I rarely use spreadsheets, most of the time to draw simple curves)

Could you explain what the dangerous features are?

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#27

Post by kaveh_h »

Spreadsheets are pretty good for using when exploring the execution of an algorithm or computation graph. You can basically book keep every step of an execution.

Efficiencies or lack of it is visible in the spreadsheet in a very concrete way. How many used cells are there, how many “steps” or rows is required to finish a computation and how many times are cells addressed clearly relates to time and space complexity of an algorithm.

Re: 3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae

#28

Post by dandelany »

MrEldritch wrote: post #13
billrobertson42 wrote: post #4

Excel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.

You jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, people keep trying to use it for things . (And no, that reason is not "they're too stupid to learn how to code") And I'm not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to…

I work for NASA JPL... I think most people would be amazed if they knew how much “rocket science” was done in Excel.
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