Love the article's main photo. The first thought that came to mind: now THAT is a programmer.
Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
21–30 of 129 posts
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#22This is amazing and much-needed progress for Excel, which I think is arguably one of the greatest software products ever (except perhaps the web browser).
Unfortunately for Excel, it’s essential to Microsoft’s product strategy for keeping people on Windows, which means that Excel on other platforms feels almost as if it were sabotaged compared to the “native” experience in Windows. I feel like Excel could really thrive if only it could separate itself from the mothership and focus on its own interests.
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#23I always think a spreadsheet that understands units would be nice: A1=10A, A2=2Ω, A3=A1*A2=20V, something like that
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#24I always think a spreadsheet that understands units would be nice: A1=10A, A2=2Ω, A3=A1*A2=20V, something like that
If only ResolverOne had taken off or been open sourced.
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#25It's interesting to note that one of the people behind this work is Simon Peyton Jones, known (among other things) for creating haskell and being the lead developer of the GHC.
Isn’t he busy at Facebook or is he though with that?
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#26This is amazing and much-needed progress for Excel, which I think is arguably one of the greatest software products ever (except perhaps the web browser). Unfortunately for Excel, it’s essential to Microsoft’s product strategy for keeping people on Windows, which means that Excel on other platforms feels almost as if it were sabotaged compared to the “native” experience in Windows. I feel like Excel could really thri…
Absolutely, and although the end user was the primary focus of this article and perhaps of the effort as a whole, this initiative can't help but have a positive impact on the libraries used by those heretofore nameless "third parties" such as myself who use code to transfer data to/from Excel.
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks, insurers, accountants; I know a company with 100M euro rev per year that runs entirely on Excel with VBA. Their office car park gate is opened, closed and managed with Excel. It sounds crazy but the CTO is a cofounder and he found it is much cheaper to just do everthing that way. They have been running like that for over 20 years.
I think software is often more complicated then it needs to be. I used to write a lot of vbScript, but now I use Node/JavaScript whenever I need to glue something together. And there are many modules in Node.JS that you can glue together in order to do something useful. I find it even easier then vbScript/Excel/VBA!
I am (as a matter of principle) only working on projects which need to run for 10+ years or cannot be upgraded (firmware for very constrained devices) so yes, software is often far more complicated than it needs to be, but writing it in VBA or JS is not helping imho. Carefully designing, typing and formally proving (parts) is what makes me have applications running on cheap servers with basically 10+ years uptime (besides OS security updates) that give me income without work. I run software (SAAS) more complicated and with more clients on one 15 euro per month server than many run on complex aws setups with node/js/mongo. Also with higher uptime; although aws etc can give you 100% uptime, the quality of most software is so bad that it goes down. Ofcourse maybe you are different and take care to make things robust; that is not the common vba/nodejs hacker though in my experience.
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#28This is amazing and much-needed progress for Excel, which I think is arguably one of the greatest software products ever (except perhaps the web browser). Unfortunately for Excel, it’s essential to Microsoft’s product strategy for keeping people on Windows, which means that Excel on other platforms feels almost as if it were sabotaged compared to the “native” experience in Windows. I feel like Excel could really thri…
Actually, it is essential to keep people on Office, Windows is secondary, hence the big push for Office 365 subscriptions.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/18/18187990/microsoft-365-co...
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#29This is pretty neat. Tangentially, does anyone have a good way of version controlling excel files? I deal with people in the finance domain all the time, and for some files that come across my desk, it's terrifying to see multi-million dollar decisions being made in a file where anyone could change anything and not know any better.
Re: Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets
#30It's interesting to note that one of the people behind this work is Simon Peyton Jones, known (among other things) for creating haskell and being the lead developer of the GHC.
Isn’t he busy at Facebook or is he though with that?
SPJ never worked at facebook.. maybe you are thinking of Simon Marlow?