This isn't Excel, but in my own spreadsheet, I do have a feature that turns on dependencies in the entire spreadsheet. Been thinking about highlighting those for a single cell at a time as well. But even with Excel, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to analyze its contents with one of many Excel-reading libraries out-there and spit out a report. Could even develop tools like findbugs to do some automated code analysis or best practices adherence checks. But really, Excel is just a red herring of a tangent in all this. I brought up spreadsheets not in the context of Excel specifically, but as a general model of computing that can be used with other programming languages, environments, and usage patterns.
Alexey ________________________________ From: Josh Berry <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, January 5, 2011 12:44:39 PM Subject: Re: [The Java Posse] Re: programming theory: Quantum physics...to Java....to Scala? 2011/1/5 Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]>: > The main problem is that Excel spreadsheets are basically similar to > programs littered with GOTO's everywhere except that these statements only > appear when you click on them, so it's pretty much impossible to understand > a spreadsheet without visiting all its cells. > Admittedly, I hardly use Excel so my knowledge might be outdated, but I > don't think there is any tool which, given a spreadsheet, gives you a full > overview of all the cells, their formulas and their dependencies in a way > that makes its structure easy to understand. My understanding is that people like Excel when they care much much much more about the data than they do about the code. So, don't think of it as seeing a bunch of GOTOs all over the place, think of it as seeing the resulting data in one shot, where you can see where data came from by clicking on it. Granted, this only goes back a step, if you will. I agree it would be neat to see a cell and the full line back of all cells it depends on back to just declared data. (Has that been done?) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
