[PRL] The Importance of Excel

[Paul A. Steckler]

Have you seen David Pollak's language, Visi, which uses a kind of
spreadsheet metaphor? You specify source and sink variables, and when
sources change, that triggers recomputation. It's statically-typed,
higher-order and lazy (some of which may be good things).

He has a demo where the sources and sinks are associated with text
fields in an iPhone app, so the user interaction works something like
a spreadsheet. But the underlying computation is specified by a
program text.

Here's a link to the language's blog: http://blog.visi.la/

-- Paul


On 2/14/13, Jesse A. Tov <tov at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:26 AM, John Clements
> <clements at brinckerhoff.org>wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Sounds familiar.
>
> “. . . But when [spreadsheets] written in [Excel] grow into large programs,
> they may also become difficult to maintain. To improve the maintainability
> of programs in [Excel], I propose porting portions into [?] languages.”
>
> Jesse
>


-- 
Paul Steckler
steck at stecksoft.com