<story><title>3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae</title><url>https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180213/308549/3D_engine_entirely_made_of_MS_Excel_formulae__Enjoy_this_Doomxls_file_.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>billrobertson42</author><text>Excel w&amp;#x2F;o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>infogulch</author><text>If Excel had just a couple more features it could be much more ergonomic and not even need macros. Specifically: anonymous functions&amp;#x2F;lambdas made with just pure formulas. Define a function in a cell like `=($s) =&amp;gt; [expr]` (or something idc). Call it with `=A1(&amp;quot;string arg&amp;quot;, B2:B100)` or by name if you name it via named ranges. Functions are obviously a new data type, so you can pass them as parameters to each other or to relevant builtins. It would turn Excel into some kind of hybrid pure functional&amp;#x2F;spatial language where the code itself is spatial data.</text></comment>
<story><title>3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae</title><url>https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180213/308549/3D_engine_entirely_made_of_MS_Excel_formulae__Enjoy_this_Doomxls_file_.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>billrobertson42</author><text>Excel w&amp;#x2F;o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MrEldritch</author><text>You jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, &lt;i&gt;people keep trying to use it for things&lt;/i&gt;. (And no, that reason is not &amp;quot;they&amp;#x27;re too stupid to learn how to code&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;m not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to recurse or iterate sanely would remove the transparency of having every iteration of a computation clearly visualized cell-by-copy-pasted-cell.</text></comment>