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Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

microsoft.com

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Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#31

Post by greggyb »

perl4ever wrote: post #27

I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. It doesn't seem like anyone who is literate in functional programming would want to use this, and anyone who isn't up to it wouldn't either. One of the most annoying things about Excel is it has so many parts apparently designed by people or groups that didn't talk to each other and didn't have a grasp of all the rest of it, let alone…

> I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query.

Because Power Query is not a spreadsheet application, and has some much more severe performance cliffs than Excel proper does.

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#32

Post by easton »

perl4ever wrote: post #27

I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. It doesn't seem like anyone who is literate in functional programming would want to use this, and anyone who isn't up to it wouldn't either. One of the most annoying things about Excel is it has so many parts apparently designed by people or groups that didn't talk to each other and didn't have a grasp of all the rest of it, let alone…

Power Query is only a thing in Excel for Windows though, it’s likely it will eventually be replaced with something cross platform. And if you don’t want to make .NET load every time you open your workbook, you have this.

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#33

Post by slaymaker1907 »

perl4ever wrote: post #27

I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. It doesn't seem like anyone who is literate in functional programming would want to use this, and anyone who isn't up to it wouldn't either. One of the most annoying things about Excel is it has so many parts apparently designed by people or groups that didn't talk to each other and didn't have a grasp of all the rest of it, let alone…

You definitely don't want to write anything complicated with it, but I think it is a nice intermediate that is more secure than macros and also is closer to writing Excel formulas than implementing custom macros.

One thing that would greatly improve the experience would be to allow for formulas to contain just a lambda and then reference that lambda from another cell as a cell reference. Currently you have to use manage lambdas under Formulas > Name Manager. This would make debugging a lot easier in my opinion so that you can freely mix data entry with computation. Not sure why they haven't done this already, but I suspect it is because of assumptions baked into Excel.

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#34

Post by Noumenon72 »

I've used Excel to automate things like splitting spreadsheets into separate files, and I write functional code with lambdas as a programmer. The way they phrased this makes it sound like their goal is to allow you to do hideously complex things, not to let you do more powerful things simply. I started out excited and ended up scared.

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#35

Post by dllthomas »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #13

Am I the only one who read the title and was immediately reminded of http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ ? (Is the title a deliberate call to that site, or something even older?)

And it's being discussed there (... shallowly, so far) as well :D

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5621

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#37

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #26
booleandilemma wrote: post #8

The Calc Intelligence project at Microsoft Research Cambridge has a long-standing partnership with the Excel team to transform spreadsheet formulas into a full-fledged programming language. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[deleted]

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#38

Post by perl4ever »

greggyb wrote: post #31
perl4ever wrote: post #27

I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. It doesn't seem like anyone who is literate in functional programming would want to use this, and anyone who isn't up to it wouldn't either. One of the most annoying things about Excel is it has so many parts apparently designed by people or groups that didn't talk to each other and didn't have a grasp of all the rest of it, let alone…

> I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. Because Power Query is not a spreadsheet application, and has some much more severe performance cliffs than Excel proper does.

To you and easton, my point is that even if Power Query has shortcomings, it's clearly the best thing to build on and improve, assuming VBA is dying a slow death and can't be revived. Even if, like, you wanted to make another separate language, it should still resemble Power Query, only better.

I don't think people at Microsoft are looking at Excel as a whole, like lost souls squatting in a mansion and building sand castles in the room that they live in that have no relationship to the actual building and what it needs to keep from falling down.

I'm not sure what you mean by performance cliffs. Can you give an example of where and how you would better accomplish something without Power Query? Are you talking about processing data in the range of a few hundred megabytes?

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#39

Post by perl4ever »

easton wrote: post #32
perl4ever wrote: post #27

I don't understand the point of this function, when Excel already has Power Query. It doesn't seem like anyone who is literate in functional programming would want to use this, and anyone who isn't up to it wouldn't either. One of the most annoying things about Excel is it has so many parts apparently designed by people or groups that didn't talk to each other and didn't have a grasp of all the rest of it, let alone…

Power Query is only a thing in Excel for Windows though, it’s likely it will eventually be replaced with something cross platform. And if you don’t want to make .NET load every time you open your workbook, you have this.

That doesn't sound like a reason to me. What in the fundamental nature of Power Query prevents it from being cross platform? Or, conversely, what prevents something new that is cross platform from working basically the same as Power Query if it must be strictly incompatible?

It's possible we're not talking about the same thing. Microsoft has slapped "Power" on so many different things. When I google "Power Query" I get a lot of "Power BI" stuff and I try to avoid that like the plague. In my limited experience, it's flaky, unstable, and adds negative value to my reports.

From my perspective, Power Query appears to be similar to the scripting language in something like Qlikview. Except much less painful (for me). I also think "grokking" Power Query could lead to improving SQL, even. The split between SQL and things like PL/SQL or T-SQL always felt wrong to me. Just having functions as a seamless part seems like the thing that was always missing.

Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function

#40

Post by disconcision »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #16

Wow, that recursive example is a nightmare. I can't imagine being the person that's asked to debug what's going wrong here a few years down the line.

I assume you don't mean the string reversal example. The fixed-point fibonacci isn't meant to show the way you'd actually write fibonacci; rather it's intended to show the debatably interesting property that you /can/ write a recursive function without giving it a name.
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