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Microsoft Excel is Now Turing Complete

Ben Halpern on February 10, 2021

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Dan Silcox • Edited

Cue obligatory gif: Jeff Goldblum gif

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Etienne Burdet • Edited

So what is gonna be ported to Excel first: Doom or React? Take your bets 💸!

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ItsASine (Kayla)

Doom, then Skyrim haha

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Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️)

I'm re-defining Atwood's law today.

This is my proclamation.

“Any application that can be written in Excel, will eventually be written in Excel.”

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Riccardo Bernardini

Bad news, actually.

No, seriously. Excel was already abused too much. (NHS, anyone?)

Excel is a wonderful tool when it is used for what was designed; I can admit using it as a "paper database" (a database that you can keep on piece of paper and update by hand) such as (short) list of address of project partners; everything else is just a no-no.

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Ashley Sheridan

I always found the formula editor in Libre Office to be pretty good. Not sure when it too will support LAMBDA functions, but I can't imagine they'll be used a lot if any sort of backwards compatibility between different versions of Excel is needed.

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shadowtime2000

We need to move beyond a VDOM to a Virtual Spreadsheet for faster updates lol.

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Mohammad Mohammadi

Well, at the price of Microsoft office, I think it's an expensive programming language!

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Reinhart Previano K. • Edited

Microsoft PowerPoint: “Finally, a worthy opponent.”

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John Kazer

Having tried (and mostly failed?) for quite some time to get their JavaScript API up and working for Office to replace VBA online, is this the proper solution? Excel is data-driven and using lambda functions properly makes it a functional language and looks very LISP-like (from the limited examples I've seen).

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Scott

I cannot believe that M$ hasn't imbedded C# within the office suite. Then Excel would be top notch. IMO.

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Hatem Hosny

Microsoft Power Fx: the low-code programming language

powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog...