Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
microsoft.com
Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#2There 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:
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 Hermans’s lovely blog post about writing a Turing machine in Excel doesn’t, strictly speaking, establish Turing completeness because it uses successive rows for successive states, so the number of steps is limited by the number of rows.)
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#3One small recent thread:
Lambda: The ultimate Excel worksheet function - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25923628 - Jan 2021 (4 comments)
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#4There 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.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#5The 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...
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#6I wonder how a programming language “extension” to Excel works together with the fact that the excel language is localized. Will the lambda function names be similarly localized?
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#7The "Lambda" paper Steele and Sussman never wrote!
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/papers
Including:
"Lambda the Ultimate Imperative"
"Lambda the Ultimate Declarative"
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#8The 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.
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#9Great to see Excel adding more features!
The argument I've heard against doing this sorta thing was that they wanted to keep Excel simple enough to not alienate many non-technical users, sorta forcing it to be a simple, accessible environment for everyone.
It'll be neat to see how the user-base adapts to a more powerful feature-set. I mean, it'd seem like a lot of folks will be thrilled, finally having some extra functionality without having to use macros/VBA/VSTO/COM/etc., though how might non-technical folks feel about a coworker sending them a spreadsheet with function-values?
Re: Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
#10Oh 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.