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On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 5:08 AM, Mike Stephens <rubfor / recitel.net> wrote:

> Chad Perrin wrote in post #990130:
>
> > I don't think it really qualifies as a language at all.  It's more like
> > an extensible set of cupboards with (non-graphing) calculators from the
> > early '90s built into them.
>
> You may be interested in this
> http://www.programmingforums.org/thread15823.html which shows Excel
> solving Dijkstra's Algorithm.
>
> Excel is probably Turing complete (opinions differ) if you exclude the
> notion of infinite sets.
>
> If you consider a web site that collects user details, generates an
> insurance quote and takes payment, then my initial assessment (I've not
> built it yet) is Excel has the required features, including
> authentication, logging, cookies etc. You would need a web server to
> launch each Excel 'program', and you would need a module that converts
> formatted Excel pages into HTML. Some functions like calling web
> services and HTML formatting might practically have to be implemented as
> non-Excel code (eg VBA or Ruby) but as these would require only simple
> configuration they could be viewed as extensions to the inbuilt
> functions and would not require programming ability on the part of the
> user.
>
> The issue (sometimes called the Turing Tarpit) is that Excel is a
> programming alnguage but without many of the sophistications you see in
> the likes of Ruby, and therefore may be unnecessarily awkward to program
> in.
>
> Nevertheless I think it is instructive. If you can imagine solving
> practical problems in Excel then you should be able to solve the same
> problems in the more accepted functional languages without being tempted
> to slip back into imperative habits.
>
> I guess my little bit of tinkering with this leads me to ask "Why should
> I have to instruct the computer how to navigate data structures and code
> my own error capturing? Why can't I just define what I want to see, and
> then look at whether it turns out as I expected?"
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>
Coding everything in Excel might be an interesting paradigm to play with. It
might even reveal new ways of looking at problems that you hadn't previously
considered. But does it really warrant a title like "lambda shambda" and the
suggestion that it is easier than real languages like Haskell? It might be
possible (I'm skeptical) to write a web app in Excel, but is this really
something you'd want to do for anything other than an exercise?

I'm having a hard time telling whether you're just a little too excited
about this idea, trolling, or legitimately serious.

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