Lambda the Ultimate

My finance clients were thrilled with this new way to overuse Excel.

For my own taste, I find it annoying that Excel doesn't publicly document whether it's a strict or lazy language. Part of the reason is probably that "it depends" on a few edge cases, notably Real-Time Data Servers (promises) and VBA calls.

As I have written previously, the languages evolve in the same direction under complexity pressure. The confirmation comes sometimes from unexpected places. I'm waiting until they add objects and dependency injection to excel as well.

I *really* like spreadsheets (may be not so much excel).

Yes, typical spreadsheet users don't know about programming languages, theory, etc. They just want to munch numbers, or create a small database to track their music collection. Nothing wrong with that. All the power to them.

I would argue that combining visual basic and excel is not a typical use-case, but rather an atrocious one that goes against the grain of the purely functional reactive substrate that are spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets is programming: we should help spreadsheet users to be more powerful, but only if they want to, and without visual basic, thank you.

The only question is whether MS is up to creating a new online/JS spreadsheet to compete with Google (like Visual Studio to VS Code).

I have often thought that spreadsheets could be used as a substrate or organizing principle for some kind of programming language. In fact one could make a good case that spreadsheets actually ARE a special case of programming language.

Human brains that don't do well with one-dimensional text that has lots of nesting levels, can often organize things better when presented with a table of values and a well-defined way to derive each from other values.

Dataflow languages are by nature reactive and functional. Change an input, the computation gets done and intermediate values change as necessary, and the outputs change. Which is a lot like spreadsheets in the first place.

Thing is, even though I believe this idea is driven by a good and useful impulse, I don't think this particular idea is good design. It drops out of the dataflow paradigm by introducing exactly the features of linear programming languages that tend to give humans the most confusion and trouble. In a dataflow language the way to achieve clear and consistent abstraction is with a "subroutine" that is just another page in the same language and the way to achieve I/O with the underlying system is via "cells" that are defined in terms of values that may change in the external world or which result in output to the external world when written.