Oh no - can't they just integrate M instead? It's a great (skeleton of a) language with a similar basis but far nicer to write.
You might be interested in
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-micro...
Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#62This is cool. I work on a lot of spreadsheets at work and am religiously against dropping into VBA for anything. It would often be easier, but it then destroys the portability of the spreadsheet (now it has to be .xlsm, people get scary warnings, etc.).
Also, does this:
> With LAMBDA, Excel has become Turing-complete.
sound like a threat to anyone? :)
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#63I 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…
The fact that this is part of the main formula language and not some bolted-on things means that is it somewhat incremental. Apply more of the incremental data log type research, and this really could be something neat. (The "grid calculus" would seem to indicate better linear algebra and maybe even tensor things are on the way, too!
I hope this gets implemented in libreoffice too; I will certainly tell non-programmers to stop using python or whatever and go back to spreadsheets!
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The physical world is by definition finite This isn't obvious to me, would you elaborate?
Take everything in the world. Every physical piece. Break it into the smallest slice you care to: (atoms, quarks, whatever). The count of those things is bounded. It's a huge number, but it's finite. Infinity is not a real concept, it's imaging that there is no number that can be bounded.
This demonstrate countability, not finiteness. If by "world" you mean universe, there's no guarantee that you can "take everything in it", because it might be infinite.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#65The blog post's title is an homage to a series of papers from the 70s, which formulated the Scheme programming language and the beginnings of what we now know as "functional programming". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programm...
Specifically the "Lambda: The Ultimate" bit.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#66There is, perhaps surprisingly (or not), already a relevant XKCD mentioning this feature while poking fun at the computational abominations that were already possible in Excel: https://xkcd.com/2453/ On that note, TFA claims that the introduction of LAMBDA finally makes Excel Turing complete, unlike the kind of Turing machine simulators the stick figure is referring to in the XKCD comic... > (In contrast, Felienne He…
To be fair, no computer is an actual TM since memory is finite.
Right, all computers have a bounded amount of state, so they can only parse regular languages.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#67The blog post's title is an homage to a series of papers from the 70s, which formulated the Scheme programming language and the beginnings of what we now know as "functional programming". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programm...
Specifically the "Lambda: The Ultimate" bit.
Which is one of my favourite PLT websites:
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#68Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#69Funny how the top of the article starts with "custom functions without code" and then immediately shows code. I get that calling code by its name can make it sound scary, but this whole notion of it being 'easy because it is not code' seems to be a big fat lie for comfort. Same goes for the magic no-code systems where code is replaced with 'expressions' or graphical 'workflows' which essentially is exactly the same t…
Where’s the immediate code?
I think those are basically Excel formulas, which in context, are not what Excel users would consider “code”.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#70The blog post's title is an homage to a series of papers from the 70s, which formulated the Scheme programming language and the beginnings of what we now know as "functional programming". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programm...
Funnily enough the two examples they provide in this article (reverse string and factorial) were the exact two first problems I encountered in the Scheme class I took in college. I'm guessing both of these problems are defined in those papers.