5 HN users recommended this talk5 months2017–2025score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters point to it whenever Excel, spreadsheets or functional programming come up, as a fun and serious take on spreadsheets as real programming.
Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.
“Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel” (HN, 2020)
Excel itself is functional and reactive already, wouldn't adding an FRP language on top of that be a bit superfluous? Check out Felienne Hermans' work if you haven't already: [this video] [link]
This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: [this video] I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.
Interesting, fun talk on Excel as a programming language
And once again Felienne Hermans is proven right about the world running on spreadsheets and that we should take them a lot more seriously for that reason alone. [0] [this video]
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