Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets

Post by sorenjan » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 7:38 PM UTC

sbierwagen wrote: post #108

sorenjan wrote: post #60

I rarely use Excel nowadays, but if I could choose one thing to improve it would be to let me use the English names for functions. Excel is localized to my language, and that includes function names. That probably made sense when targeting non technical people 30 years ago, but it makes it harder to search online and is non intuitive when you're used to other programming languages.

Set your system locale to US/English, then.

Post by wenc » Sun, Jan 20, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

vba wrote: post #62

wenc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some pretty mindbending things with VBA on Excel. They work but they are not pretty and not easy to maintain. VBA is technically a "complete" language (I want to say Turing-complete but that is not a meaningful trait), so it is possible to do a lot with it, but one ends up having to re-implement (sometimes badly) stuff found in other languages in order to write the main parts of the code. Part of what makes…

"but I've learned that when dealing with a Microsoft stack, there are advantages to using Microsoft-native languages like C#." curious. can you elaborate?

Post by 4thaccount » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 12:35 AM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #17

4thaccount wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the language for everything, but I've found you can do so much with a spreadsheet and a little VBA. Optimization, graphics, math...whatever. I also figure the company you refer to has some real benefit by focusing on one technology everyone knows. But how and the heck do they manage a gate in a spreadsheet?

I know about it because my friend (son of the ceo) provided the electronics for the gate and he showed me all the software in 1999 because we were pitching a rewrite in ‘web tech’ (my go to was Perl in those times). The gate software wrote to the parallel port via the win32 api to open and close the gate after the day/night watch entered the numberplate and name into the sheet.

Post by cm2187 » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 9:10 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #110

ramraj07 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possibility is this - the people who mess with Excel VBA are generally very smart folk who just never went too techy, but then got really good at Excel and just learned vba as the next logical step. That means the code might not be kosher but it will be thoughtfully written and encompassing all the practical use cases. Contrast that with a 20something can grad who while competent isn't as smart as that non tech g…

Still, when you have a team of very smart folk writing complicated bussiness critical software in Excell, it is a good indication that you should invest in training those people in more proper programming languages.

Post by jammygit » Mon, Jan 21, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #73

chris1993 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated. What sort of software needs to run with ten years uptime? How do you avoid downtime for operating system updates on those cheap servers?

A lot of embedded hardware, financial transaction systems, factory critical ERP systems (I built one mid 90s in Clipper which is still running in that place; actually I built a few which are still mission critical at this point in time). But, less hardcore, also my own projects; picturepush.com and flexlists.com for instance have been running for > 10 years making me money. Flexlists was hacked / down once because of…