Category talk:Excel
Personally, I think Excel is a bona fide programming language. When I worked for Microsoft Research a claim was made in a lab seminar, by a language theory researcher who shall remain nameless at present but is a leading in the Haskell community, that Excel was by far the most widely used purely functional programming language.
--Brnikat (talk) 20:02, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
- Good day!
- Hmm... Excluding VBA from the topic, Excel's built-in functions/formulas can be considered a programming language. However, I think (just my opinion) Microsoft did not build/made Excel as a programming language/IDE (since it is a spreadsheet program).
- If it is necessary, feel free to edit the category. Thanks! --Simple9371 (talk) 03:02, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
- I half remember reading about how researchers in Conways game of life had arranged generators of gliders to interact and were thinking that by arranging starting positions they might theoretically produce a turing machine. Despite that, I wouldn't call Conways game of life a programming language and neither would most people call Excel a programming language.
- In extremis, an expert can make a point by saying that a spreadsheet could be thought of as a functional programming language, but even they might concede that there point is made because it is an extreme view probably shocking their audience out of their complacency.
- --Paddy3118 (talk) 06:14, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
- A fully working computer has been implemented in Life. The URL is http://rendell-attic.org/gol/utm/index.htm and needless to say it's a complex colony!
- --Brnikat (talk) 10:24, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
- Regarding "Microsoft did not build/made Excel as a programming language/IDE (since it is a spreadsheet program)": notice that Excel and Lotus 1-2-3, both spreadsheets, had a programming language consisting of commands written in the cells. It's still available in Excel 2013.
- Regarding Conway's game of life: funny example, it's fairly easy to build a CGOL emulator in a spreadsheet, with only spreadsheets functions, and relying on some evaluation order (that can be controlled by options, usually). Of course the grid of the game is made of spreadsheet cells.
- Actually, there is much more to spreadsheets than merely accounting functions, with some imagination. For instance, it's possible to sort a list with spreadsheet functions. It's probably not enough to say it's a "true" programming language, but the same can be said of LaTeX or SQL, and probably others on RosettaCode.
- And here, I'm not even considering replacing "temporal loops" by "spatial loops": copying a formula is like a "for loop", and can be used for instance to compute the solution of an equation, or to integrate a function. Of course, you have much more power if you use the solver, or VBA, or external DLLs (like LAPACK to compute eigenvalues for data analysis), combine all of this with your data to produce tabular or graphical output, everything within your spreadshet. Not too bad, for a not-a-programming-language.
- Have also a look at the nice Newton-Excel-Bach blog.
- Oh, and of course, have a look at the Wikipedia article on programming language, to see why your conception of a programming language may just be wrong.
- Arbautjc (talk) 10:47, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Unfortunately there is a site limitation that does not allow images to be uploaded. This might affect how graphical solutions to problems can be shown on Rosetta Code. I did this several years ago which is an oocalc entry.
--Paddy3118 (talk) 06:23, 12 July 2015 (UTC)