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? 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. -- Livin' La Vida Loca Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal. ================================================================= 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]
