From: Chad Perrin Date: 2011-04-04T08:30:47+09:00 Subject: Re: Lambda Shambda --9zSXsLTf0vkW971A Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 10:13:29PM +0900, Martin DeMello wrote: > On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Phillip Gawlowski > wrote: > > On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 7:29 AM, Mike Stephens > > wrote: > >> > >> However, since you ask: Excel is by far the World's most widely used > >> programming language. > > > > As Carl Sagan once said: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary > > evidence. > > > > Excel is an automation tool, certainly, but I wouldn't call a finance > > sheet, sales report, or statistical analysis of data in a diagram > > "programming". >=20 > No less a person than Simon Peyton Jones has called Excel "the world's > most popular functional language". Oscar Wilde said "Everything popular is wrong." Abraham Lincoln said "Avoid popularity if you would have peace." Immanuel Kant said "Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few, and number not voices, but weigh them." (Apologies if I misremember some detail in those.) I don't really give a crap what's popular, nor who has said it was popular, when choosing something for merit. I'm also not entirely convinced he thinks popularity is any kind of sign of quality (given his involvement in GHC development, which is nothing at all like Excel), nor that his statement of popularity of Excel as a functional "language" is unbiased, given his employment at Microsoft employee for a dozen years or so. Where are his independently verifiable statistics? What are his methodologies for collection and comparison of that data? The truth of the matter is that he was just one of a few people who contributed to a paper that has a sensational title -- a title that, by the way, strongly suggests Excel is *not* a very good programming tool (to say nothing of the *contents* of the paper). =46rom the beginning, where it is stated that their efforts to improve the suitability of spreadsheets to support "programming-like" tasks, it is quite evident to anyone not prejudicially invested in seeing Excel as a "programming language" that the authors are not strong in any conviction that a spreadsheet constitutes a "programming language". In the conclusion, they very nearly say outright that spreadsheets have their uses, but that as a general programming paradigm spreadsheets damned well *suck*: We have presented a design process in which we started from a popular, but limited, end-user programming paradigm (the spreadsheet), and extended it to provide some of the capabilities of general purpose programming languages (user defined functions and matrices). We have not approached our work as a generic language design exercise. In short, they're not trying to design a functional programming language. Rather, they're trying to improve the capabilities of Excel for providing the support needed to give people a pseudo-functional paradigm for accomplishing "programming-like" tasks when those people are so heavily invested in using Excel to accomplish such tasks that they are unwilling to learn the right tool for the job. Excel is a *spreadsheet* -- which happens to have a programming language embedded in it (and not a very good one, at that). It may technically be Turing-complete, but so are the GIMP, Firefox, and Conway's Game of Life (two of them for much the same reason as Excel). The Turing completeness status of only one of these is, to me, even *remotely* impressive. If you can find a way to *usefully* embed a Turing complete general purpose programming language into a graphical user application without the application being definable by people with an axe to grind as "Turing complete", I'll give you a cookie. If you choose to reject that as meaningful criteria for defining something as a programming language, thus rejecting the GIMP and Firefox as programming "languages", you also reject MS Excel. The fact of the matter is that Excel is not a language at all. --=20 Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] --9zSXsLTf0vkW971A Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (FreeBSD) iEYEARECAAYFAk2ZADoACgkQ9mn/Pj01uKW08ACg0Z0oR6SurgRmIP1VBVMtdtX3 SO8AoIQMNMXIED1BvoWG6kPKNLJor0J9 =idHS -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --9zSXsLTf0vkW971A--