[HN Gopher] Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
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Lambda: The Ultimate Excel Worksheet Function
Author : elemeno
Score : 41 points
Date : 2021-04-22 08:55 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.microsoft.com)
| wgetch wrote:
| There 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 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.)
| maest wrote:
| To be fair, no computer is an actual TM since memory is finite.
| quonn wrote:
| It can pause and ask you to temporarily attach another hard
| disk. Could be infinite as long as one can afford buying
| disks.
| jaza wrote:
| But the amount of raw material on the planet needed for
| manufacturing more disks is finite.
|
| The amount of raw material in the universe is finite at a
| given point in time (it could be infinite over time, we
| don't know if time is infinite either).
|
| I think we've already established (especially over the past
| year) that fiat money is infinite.
|
| The Turing machine is a mathematical model. Infinity only
| exists in the world of mathematics. The physical world is
| by definition finite.
| [deleted]
| teraflop wrote:
| The 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...
| zamadatix wrote:
| This is great, there were a few network functions I used a lot
| (validate IP format, find network address, find broadcast
| address, check if address is in subnet, etc) and would always
| just stick a "scratch" sheet in a workbook duplicated for each
| time I needed to perform an operation and nobody was ever going
| to be able to decode after I hit "send" on the email. The
| additions they've added make this so simple and ubiquitously
| available I wouldn't even call it ugly for that use case anymore.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I 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?
| msla wrote:
| The "Lambda" paper Steele and Sussman never wrote!
|
| http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/papers
|
| Including:
|
| "Lambda the Ultimate Imperative"
|
| "Lambda the Ultimate Declarative"
| tunesmith wrote:
| Writing a lambda like that would require documentation. I wish
| Excel had a mode to look kinda like Jupyter except reactive (or
| observablehq except a desktop app), so I could easily add
| documentation for any cell and fold/unfold as I wish.
| zamadatix wrote:
| If you save it as a named function you can add a comment and
| that will appear as the tooltip while you're working on calling
| the function. If you're just wanting to comment how/why the
| function works in the cell you're defining or instantiating and
| immediately using it Excel has comments and notes you can
| attach to the cell or a group of cells.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _The 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.
| jxy wrote:
| Now we have a legitimate use case for the Y combinator.
|
| What's next? A full implementation of scheme? Common lisp?
| taltman1 wrote:
| Check out this paper from my friend Ronen, and Prof. Fateman,
| putting Lisp into Excel:
|
| "A paper written with Ronen Gradwohl on Lisp and Symbolic
| Functionality in an Excel Spreadsheet: Development of an OLE
| Scientific Computing Environment, August, 2002. (code available
| on request) "
|
| https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/algebra.html
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| Am I the only one who read the title and was immediately reminded
| of http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/?
|
| (Is the title a deliberate call to that site, or something even
| older?)
| joliv wrote:
| The common parent is "Lambda: The Ultimate Imperative" (1976)
| https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5790/AIM-353....
| SatvikBeri wrote:
| And more generally, the Lambda Papers by Guy Steele and
| Gerald Sussman, which also include "Lambda: The Ultimate
| Declarative", "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO", and "Lambda: The
| Ultimate Opcode".
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Great 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?
| SirSourdough wrote:
| Most organizations I have seen already only have a couple
| people who can actually make and edit the advanced sheets used
| by the org and lots of people who use those sheets with a very,
| very rudimentary knowledge of Excel to generally get their jobs
| done.
|
| I don't really see the addition of new advanced functionality
| changing that paradigm.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| Oh 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.
| aperrien wrote:
| What is M?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| M is the language of Power Query.
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Wow, that recursive example is a nightmare. I can't imagine being
| the person that's asked to debug what's going wrong here a few
| years down the line.
| dang wrote:
| One small recent thread:
|
| _Lambda: The ultimate Excel worksheet function_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25923628 - Jan 2021 (4
| comments)
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