[PRL] The Importance of Excel

[John Clements]

On Feb 14, 2013, at 8:06 AM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

> 
> When I first received this link early in the week, someone suggested that
> our unit checking system for Excel (ICSE 2004) could have caught the bug. 
> 
> But if I understood the paper correctly the formula should have been 
> 
>     N 
> ------------
> average(K,L)
> 
> but was entered as 
> 
>     N 
> ------------
>   K + L 
> 
> So this is neither a type nor a unit bug but a truly logical bug.

+1

As one comment on HN indirectly alluded to, there may not be any low-hanging fruit here: the fragility of Excel is why people use it. You can get the job done quickly, and doing a better job--even a marginally better job--requires time and development resources that people don't choose to allocate to the problems.

John