And, of course, there was Playground (a object oriented language made completely from (richer) spreadsheet cells that we did for the Vivarium project in the late 80s and early 90s).
Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> Sent: Fri, March 12, 2010 8:17:54 AM Subject: Re: [fonc] Code Bubbles On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Julian Leviston <jul...@leviston.net> wrote: >>On 13/03/2010, at 2:45 AM, Dethe Elza wrote: > >>> Other have made the argument that Google is essentially the modern >>> command-line interface, but I think this goes way beyond Google. Things >>> like mash-ups are made possible by the View Source nature of the web, every >>> web page becomes an API. The ubiquity of Javascript is what makes it >>> powerful, not so much the actual syntax of Javascript (although I will go >>> on record that I *like* Javascript). >> >> >>> And back to Andrey's example that Julian was responding to. We can write >>> bookmarklets or GreaseMonkey scripts, or browser plugins that change every >>> aspect of GMail. We can use GMail to make general Google Queries. We can >>> embed spreadsheets and other executable code into GMail messages. How much >>> goal direction and configuration is needed to become "a program?" > >I disagree with this. > >>The difference seems fairly clear and obvious to me. A programming language >>must be turing complete... spreadsheets are not turing complete because they >>don't do program execution flow... looping and the like... > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness > > Wrong. Commercial spreadsheets are not Turing complete. However, it is possible for a programming language built using the spreadsheet cell as a fundamental building block to be Turing complete. See Oregon State University's work on spreadsheet research. In particular, Margaret Barnett and Martin Erwig. Margaret more focuses on computability issues, whereas Martin is more focused on trustworthiness issues (he has been experimenting+prototyping a type system for spreadsheets for about three years now). There was also an MIT Master's CS student who proposed spreadsheets as a fundamental building block for all multicore programming: Amir Hirsch. http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/
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