Forum Discussion
DISCUSSION: A future for Excel as a programming platform
lori_m has just sent me a link to
Keynote: Excel meets Lambda - Andy Gordon, Simon Peyton Jones | Lambda Days 2021 - YouTube
If you must make a choice, listen to them rather than me! After all, I now know that my recursive Lambdas have been using 'Tail Recursion'. My learning by trial and error takes me so far, but it will not necessarily embrace the standard terminology.
On thing that will need to be sorted, is that Andy and Simon probably shouldn't use the term MVP to refer to 'Minimum Viable Product' in the MS Excel context!
- Thank you for the link (thx to Lori_m too) it was very interesting to see the history of how Lambda evolved.
As for Lambda functionality and my thought to many that are asking for added functionality that include more VBA type of actions (modifying other cells, system functionality interactions, etc...) I want to say that my hope and excitement for Lambda is the added functionality in an inherently safe playground (i.e. we don't need macro permissions and hopefully soon excel online should be able to natively allow their functionality). If they want to expand Lambda further then it should have some clear delimitator such that user permissions are not needed for standard added Lambdas but only required when that expanded 'LambdaVBA' is embedded .- I suspect the 'no state change', 'no side effects' properties of functional programming will play well with those that do not wish to trust macros. I welcome the opinion of others, better informed than I, concerning the point.
Even if I'm for decades in IT business I'm not a professional programmer, more street developer, and afraid can't support such discussion, just have not enough skills. However, few comments from practical point of view.
Functional programming in general and lambdas in particular have a long history and have their own niche, and, as everything in this world, they have their strong and weak points. Among weak ones are poor maintainability and complicated re-use. From this point of view I'm bit disappointed by Andy Gordon comments that he has no idea how lambdas will bi distributed and supported, perhaps through Twitter. LAMBDA in Excel needs to have more support, these are additional functionality like MAP(), more rich IDE compare to current formula bar and Name Manger and perhaps kind of framework. Without that it will be quite limited usage.
Declaring of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which was quite popular few years ago, applied to LAMBDA is a bit formal. MVP is a great approach, but it's not a golden bullet which solves everything and need it's own set of tools to support.
Liam_Bastick knows much more about financial modeling in particular and about Excel in general, perhaps he comments. From my point of view the core of FAST is to ensure reliability and maintainability taking into account current status of Excel. From that point of view it's quite reasonable.
Despite of some scepticism I consider introduction of lamdas in Excel as a great step forward. With some further support it will have it's own niche, how wide it depends on supporting tools. But IMHO, that doesn't mean LAMBDA or nothing.
