Re: [Haskell-cafe] Speculation, OT: Program a Spreadsheet

There is the language or languages used by the developers of the spreadsheet product. There is the language of the spreadsheet itself.

Not sure what you mean with "language of the spreadsheet iself". The formula language?

There are the programming languages used by the developers of the spreadsheet (say accounting power users), like VBA.

Note that a spreadsheet product can have programming languages, it can be a programming language,

A spreadsheet is not a programming language, so you must be meaning something different, but I have no idea what.

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 5:07 AM Joachim Durchholz mailto:jo@durchholz.org> wrote:

Am 19.11.2017 um 08:05 schrieb trent shipley: > * Is a spreadsheet you can program from the spreadsheet a reasonable goal?

I.e. use the same programming language for cells formulae and scripts? Yes, that's very much reasonable.

That is possible.

However, I am interested in programming scripts in spreadsheet, not say, programming formula in Haskell.

I have no idea what your plan is, then.

> * Would using a functional language as a basic language of the project > save effort and intellectual load?

That depends on whether you're talking about the implementation language or the cell/macro language.

I was talking about implementation language.

If you plan to create a new spreadsheet program, that's a huge project. Even if you stick to cells and formulae and skip everything on the presentation side.

For the implementation language, you'll save the most time by using whatever you already know. Unless the project is going to last longer than, say, two years. And if you plan on getting other people to join the project, you'll want the language with the largest pool of interested and able people, which is essentially guesswork but I'd avoid, say, the VBA or PHP crowd ;-)

Would there be any advantage over preferring a functional over an imperative language given that Scriptsheets (as a full blown product) would itself be a functional language.

The choice of the programming language for building a new product is pretty independent of the product itself. This is because the logic that you see (cell calculations) is just a very small part of the overall code. For a new spreadsheet program, look for a language that has a good GUI library, for example, that's going to be a much larger timesaver than language semantics that matches the application domain.

I know Hadoop in in Java, except where speed is of essence, then Hadoop uses C++ or sometimes C. I figure the same would be true for this project.

Only once the project has seen several person-decades of work.

 > then sweet talk > real developers to help out.

That's a good plan :-)

Do you know any gullible developers with the chops?

Actually I'd be interested in something like this if I didn't have my own project ;-P

Which do you see as more promising a real GUI spreadsheet for Case B or one for Case C? Or would it make sense to be ambitious and try to do both in the same project using a common spreadsheet core backend and largely shared front end?

I haven't really understood what you're trying to do, so I can'd advise. Regards, Jo