
S0lly's Cellivization – Civ 1 Clone in Excel - doppp
https://s0lly.itch.io/cellivization
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partialrecall
This sort of thing is why I consider Excel a programming environment for non-
programmers, likely the best ever created. Of course most users will never use
it to it's full potential (which might well be boundless..) but it
nevertheless is simultaneously powerful and user friendly in a way that lets
people who are _ostensibly_ non-programmers perform novel computations that
the creators of Excel never anticipated. Many consumer applications,
particularly modern ones, keep their users on rails. Predefined UX paths that
execute pre-defined algorithms on data provided by the user. The user is
typically hopeless to solve any problem not explicitly anticipated by the
creators. They can't extend the functionality of the program simply by
interacting with it. Conversely a program like Excel blurs the demarcation
line between user and the developer by empowering the user with a novel
graphical programming language (and tricking people who think of themselves as
non-programmers into learning how to use it.)

Sometimes I wonder if spreadsheets had not been invented until today, could
you convince the gatekeeping UX experts employed by major tech companies to
let you bring such a product to market?

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snazz
Given this, have you or anyone else heard of a "programmer's spreadsheet" that
allowed for more advanced computations? I know that the beauty of Excel is
that it is ubiquitous, but there's a lot of historical baggage that could be
cut out and it could be integrated with a more proper programming language
(and potentially SQLite or another database as the backend).

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partialrecall
Maybe org-mode in Emacs? I know that can function as a spreadsheet of sorts,
and I expect it probably gives you access to the full power of elisp. (I have
minimal experience with using org-mode in this manner though.) This gets a bit
further away from the everyman-programmer ideal embodied by Excel though.

I have been personally experimenting with user-extensible software backed by
sqlite designed for organizing files by tags. I've found that given the right
primitives, the right DSL, extending the program to create novel queries is a
lot of fun and possibly even approachable for 'non-programmers'.

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orhmeh09
User-extensible software to organize files, based on SQLite? Have you looked
into Fossil SCM? It’s a version control system built on SQLite, but it has
additional features like wiki, forum, scripting , and an extensible ticketing
system.

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partialrecall
I'm familiar with fossil albeit not the technical details.

Mine is not a version control system and it doesn't actually store files.
Rather, it maintains an association between filenames (absolute paths) and
sets of tags. There are some tradeoffs with such a scheme, but my priorities
were that it should be non-invasive and keep filesystem access to a bare
minimum. Something that you can use to organize a cluttered nfs-mounted NAS
without actually moving the files (in case you later decide the system is not
for you, everything is in the same place as before you started.)

It's basically a relational 'card catalogue'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog))

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PhantomBKB
Okay... Now that's pretty spectacular.

The person has even written a ray tracer in excel!

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the_unknown
"This is my first game in Excel, with the first iteration (v1.0) created in
just around a week"

Okay, that's just wickedly impressive. Obviously not their first bit of Excel
programming overall but still really, really impressive.

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chris_wot
When LibreOffice can run this, then I know that they have won.

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tontonius
is 2019 the year of the Linux desktop?

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megaremote
This is great.

The excel sheet weights in at 8mb, while the original dos version only takes
up 2mb.

[https://www.myabandonware.com/game/sid-meier-s-
civilization-...](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/sid-meier-s-
civilization-1nj#Mac)

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cabaalis
Itch.io is looking very nice! Does anyone know if it's still written in lapis?

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SteveBash
Which programming language is mostly used for doing games on excel?

C#? VBA?

