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On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 3:06 PM, Johnny Morrice <spoon / killersmurf.com>wrote:

>
> > It might be easier if you guys could show how one writes a program in
> > excel. OP was talking about a web app, complete with authentication,
> > authorization, cookies, "etc". I can't even conceive of how one would
> > go about doing such a thing.
>
> There are some fun looking Excel games
> http://www.cpearson.com/excel/games.htm
>
> Don't have excel to hand so I haven't tried them
> (Note that I wouldn't have this problem if they were written in pretty
> much any other language)
>
>
Yeah, I don't have Excel, either :/

The page says "All of the VBA code is unprotected, so you are free to see
how it works." So that implies to me that this is not what we are talking
about, though, because it was Chad Perrin's initial assumption that
programming in Excel meant VBA, but Mike responded with "Unfortunately most
people think the words 'Excel' and 'programming' must equal VBA. [...] the
accomplished S# programmer only uses [VBA] as a last resort." ("S#" seems to
be a name Mike made up for programming in Excel).

I did try loading it up in Open Office, but it uses VBA macros, which I
couldn't get to work. I was surprised to see that it looked decent (
https://s3.amazonaws.com/josh.cheek/scratch/excel-game.png) so apparently
Excel has more powerful formatting capabilities than I realized. But, web
browsers have powerful formatting, and that doesn't make them programming
languages.



> > * A program to create Conway's game of life videos (
> > http://vimeo.com/21594165)
>
> That's pretty cool!  I made something similar, it rendered wireworld
> cellular automatons to animated gifs with smalltalk and gnu plotter.
> Great fun that sort of thing :)
>
>
Thanks ^_^

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 3:07 PM, Phillip Gawlowski <
cmdjackryan / googlemail.com> wrote:

>
> * I consider immutable data to be key to functional programming, and
> LISP doesn't work that way, so *I* don't see it as a functional
> language. YMMV, of course.
>
>
Common Lisp doesn't, but other Lisp dialects do (Scheme, Clojure).

I've noticed several different uses of "functional" though, some mean purely
functional (no side effects) like you are saying, ie Haskell and Clojure.
And others just mean that you basically have support for closures and first
order functions (Common Lisp, Ruby, JavaScript).

So it is sometimes difficult to talk about :/ I typically tell people that
Ruby "supports a functional paradigm", but that maybe doesn't identify
important nuances, and as Robert pointed out, most languages are headed in
that direction.

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