Excel Functions in F# Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#41

Post by sharpcells » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #10

How do they implement the subscription plans when no internet connection is required?

The subscription validation does require an intermittent internet connection to revalidate. Currently it is checked once per week but besides that check Sharp Cells can be used offline. We have updated the website to clarify this.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#42

Post by pjacotg » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 4:46 AM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #36

japanman425 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What industry are you in? I’ve never found a need for it (probably quite rightly just writing crud apps…)

I'm in B2B manufacturing. We are abusing Excel no one should use it for what we do. We have a spreadsheet that takes information from online orders into input cells. Then it has lines that if they calculate a qty of 1 or greater get consumed by CAM software. The product then gets sent to the appropriate machining center. Not a single line of VB. There are a few things that I could extract into custom formulas that wo…

I was expecting you to say finance where Excel is abused in a similar fashion!

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#43

Post by qwerty456127 » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 9:24 AM UTC

Very cool, but...

Limiting (let alone this severely) a number of functions a developer can introduce and locking them in having to pay recurrently just to overcome this limitation and keep their code working is insane. I believe this dooms the product to be extremely unpopular. This way people probably won't even invest time in giving it a try.

Real-Time Data Sources sound like a thing which can be a premium feature. Unlimited UDFs and Unlimited Commands don't.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#44

Post by keithalewis » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

Why drag F# into this? =LAMBDA(name, "Hello, "&name) works just fine. Modern Excel has MAP, REDUCE, SCAN, MAKEARRAY, etc.

Re: Excel Functions in F# Language

#45

Post by eggy » Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

japanman425 wrote: post #30

eggy wrote: post #23

Glad to see F# vs. C#. I prefer F# and it doesn't get as much play as C#. But, being more of a Lisper, I've already subscribed to Acceλerate for Microsoft 365[1]. It's basically a full scheme available in Excel with VSA (Visual Scheme for Applications - nice play on VBA to dupe the unaware ;) ). It has a full REPL and an editor and also creates UDFs. It is Excel's new Lambda on steroids. I'll have to try Sharp Cells.…

Have you ever used F# in production?

Not in the sense you probably mean, but I have performed three or four analyses when I worked at an engineering firm (entertainment - structural, mechanical) in F#. One involved an FSI system (Fluid-Solid Interaction using Project Chronos in C++) that I used F# for the mathy parts before the simulation. I also used F# to munge failure data and perform a Weibul analysis and generate a report for ride equipment. I have not used F# at all for web stuff. I typically reach for Mathematica (tried Julia, love it, but Mathematica's all-in-one notebook with curated data is hard to beat when you are doing something ecelctic and don't want to lose the flow of trying to pull in a data source or search for a library). I wish F# had more presence in the scientific community. It's very simple compared with Haskell, less verbose than C#, and it has the entire .Net ecosystem to draw on.