

Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine? - msie
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3563/microsoft_excel_revolutionary_3d_.php

======
ggruschow
He jokes and people cringe, but Excel is a huge win in some sorts of.. I'm not
sure what to call it. I hesitate to call it programming because programming to
me means all the text-file stuff from BASIC to C to Python to Haskell.

It's a language that lacks the headaches of state and sports a wonderfully
helpful editing and debugging/execution environment. Trying to get your
calculations right while seeing tons of the intermediate results is often a
lot easier, also, you don't have to worry about calculation order or
dependencies.. It's automatically handled, as are incremental update
calculations. I often wonder how we could get a similar benefits in non-
spreadsheets.

That said, it's a crumby language. You basically have to memorize the whole
language to do well with it. Tons of stuff could be be dramatically better..
in fact, in some cases they were, e.g. functions defined in spreadsheet cells,
but MS killed the competitors.

------
_delirium
Sophisticated simulations done in Excel happen in industry more often than you
might think, using all manner of graphics hacks for the display, ranging from
using cells for the display, to "pop up a new chart three times a second for 3
fps animation". It seems particularly common in finance and some kinds of
engineering. I can't help but cringe when I see it, though.

~~~
emarcotte
Yes, and in addition to this, those many MB spread sheets are also feared by
the people who maintain them. I have seen spreadsheets that have migrated from
ancient lotus products that I never knew about. There is code in them that
people do not know what it means or does. Having to update the equations they
are using periodically causes lots of panic because who knows what depends on
what. It's all hidden in cells.

The worst part is, at least with the sheets I'm specifically thinking of, they
were essentially just rows of data like you'd find in an SQL table. It's a
shame they didn't take the time to initially develop it as a table or several
tables and put some real code around it to run the calculations. At least then
someone could go and look at it and figure out what it does.

~~~
euroclydon
Maybe they can migrate to Resolver One.

------
ajuc
Excel (and other spreadsheets) is nice purely functional language (when not
using macros).

Unfortunately it is abused to be database/statistical package/etc and at some
point big spreadsheets doesn't scale and becomse pain to support.

So it should be possible to export excel spreadsheet to haskell :)

------
Groxx
_Excel supports this traditional sequential top-down approach in the VBA codes
(see the example on the previous page) and additionally it provides a very
new, fresh and revolutionary opportunity as well._

"very new"? "fresh"? "revolutionary"? I call BS. They then go on to show the
basic idea of object-oriented programming. The call-references in auditing is
cool, but it's also quite doable in a debugger (though I don't know of any
which work this "graphically"). Admittedly, the graphics probably make it a
lot easier to non-programmers, but the language has nothing new in it.

