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Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions: Generalising Spreadsheet Functions to Variable-Size Input Arrays
https://icfp20.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2020-papers/46/Elast...
Fastest beeline from research lab to the end-user I've ever seen.
The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT, RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can’t fathom why Excel hasn’t yet introduced regular expressions.
The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT, RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can’t fathom why Excel hasn’t yet introduced regular expressions.
Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as they hear “regex” (including me), I am not sure regex will bring much to regular users. If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users. (And if you really want regex, there are hundreds of results on google on how to build your own VBA UDF to get it).
The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT, RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can’t fathom why Excel hasn’t yet introduced regular expressions.
Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as they hear “regex” (including me), I am not sure regex will bring much to regular users. If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users. (And if you really want regex, there are hundreds of results on google on how to build your own VBA UDF to get it).
> If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users.
What are you talking about? Regular expressions are used everywhere. On the backend it's text parsing, on the front end it's input validation. I have never written a complete application without using it. You're also the first person I've heard grumble about them.
I get that if regex is used in an overly convoluted or messy fashion, they become unreadable and unreliable. Just like assignment operators, nested division, or any other basic programming construct. But they are also remarkably powerful at solving simple pattern matching in a robust way. I recommend you go learn them instead of making baseless claims about "the number of developers who spit on the floor" when talking about them or whatever.
Anyone else was a huge fan?
This is completely orthogonal to the full scope of LAMBDA, But it did make me laugh to see that the first example involved a classic and painful usecase (extracting 2 letters amid a string of numbers), which in Excel has to be written as: =LEFT(RIGHT(B18,LEN(B18)-FIND("-",B18)),FIND("-",RIGHT(B18,LEN(B18)-FIND("-",B18)))-1) But if only Excel would support regular expressions like Google Sheets [0], could be done as e…
Actually, adding that into the list of Excel functions would be trivially easy. The hard part would be convincing all of the managers that it won't dramatically increase the amount of work they need to do in terms of tech support.
They need to support Python.
The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions. No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT, RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can’t fathom why Excel hasn’t yet introduced regular expressions.
Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as they hear “regex” (including me), I am not sure regex will bring much to regular users. If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular users. (And if you really want regex, there are hundreds of results on google on how to build your own VBA UDF to get it).
yes still SQL is everywhere