On 2003-03-06, Ira Abramov wrote: > Quoting Beni Cherniavsky, from the post of Wed, 05 Mar: > > On 2003-03-05, Yedidyah Bar-David wrote: > > > > > For complex things, I usually find complex, sophisticated spreadsheets > > > much less maintainable than real programs (or scripts). I have heard > > > horror stories about thousands lines of macros that organizations > > > depend on and noone knows what's inside them. > > > > > Aghh, my favourite rant (-: come to think of what level of programming > > language is a spreadsheet: > > all very nice and valid points, but why would you want to look at a > spreadsheet as a programming language, when it was never meant to be one > or replace it? > Well, because my mother has to use "applications" for insurance computation that are implemented in Excel and quite badly. They are also copy-protected and code-view-protected and full of macros and forms. I'd never be annoyed by the existance of something that's not intended to be aprogramming language if people wouldn't use it as one (and force me to suffer the quality consequencesof this)...
> The first electronic spreadsheet (Visicalc, I have it running on my > Apple //c, very probably available for any Apple ][ emulator you will > find online) was written by a guy from an economics class in CMU IIRC, > to emulate what he and his coleages have been doing for years on the > blackboard. VisiCalc (for Visual Calculator) was meant to be a > scriptable table. not even scriptable, more like auto-resolving. > "Blame" Lotus and Microsoft for trying to enhance it into a monster, > where people try to keep addressbooks and other stuff it was never meant > for. They ended up with a crazy bloatware that is way more than needed > for the original intentions and never good enough for all the new > "wrong" uses the users were using it for. Microsoft keeps on feeding the > beast and adding features to keep the people happy, but only because > they can afford it, not because the crowd really needs all that power in > a single product. > > as with Word and Access, Excell is also a product where only 2% of the > users really use over 10% of the functions (or even know what they're > for) > > but A programming language it ain't. never meant to be. hence the need > to enhance it with VB and form macro generators. > Agreed. However, it could be enhanced in much better ways, to actually create something that is a reasonable tool for creating big applications. -- Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'm too lazy to use GUI - why should I click all these things to get my job done? ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
