There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.

I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.

If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.

won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk

I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

And Lotus Improv ‘solved’ spreadsheets about thirty-five years ago. So?

So?

I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.

The way to do mathematics on computers is via a CAS such as Mathematica. This is misguided pornography. Unfortunately as such it shall do what its implementers intended: for a while embrace, and if not extend, embolden.

And yes, I know Wolfram Language is proprietary too, and, yes, I know Stephen Wolfram is a massive tool, and yes, I know Mathematica licenses are expensive, and yes, I am aware of probably all the criticisms you can level my way and at it and then some in various permutations thereof, but heavens, at least it isn’t this dissolute disaster otherwise known as Excel, where “numbers have a place” but they don’t need to be numbers, and they don’t need to be in a place or have a place, but they break silently whilst you run your hedge fund.

EDIT: As soon as I get my hands on this monstrosity I shall embark upon a voyage to define several lambdas within the same cell as a list, and then make other cells depend upon it, and their type too, to see how far I can push this thing until it breaks.

I'm sure someone has already coined a law something like this:

The use of Excel expands until it fills the space of all use cases.

To my knowledge, you still can't write an email client in Excel.

OK, maybe with plug-ins, but probably not natively.

Probably not.

Maybe.

Sure you can. It would mostly VBA and not using much of the spreadsheet part, but it's totally possible to do with native VBA code. No plug-ins needed, although you might have to cheat a bit with Win32 API calls depending on exact functionality.

In a rigid lattice, aye.

I remember reading this as an undergraduate student already enrolled in LSE. My God how the times have changed.

“Le Mafie” includes Cosa Nostra (Sicilian mafia) ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian mafia), Camorra (Napolitano mafia), Sacra Corona Unita (Pugliese mafia), Banda della Magliana (Roman mafia), Mala del Brenta (Veneto mafia) and others (but I’m no expert, I’m from Milan).

When you’re a government you can mandate the file formats (and versions thereof) you are willing to accept.

Sure they can make a mandate but the grunts on ground will still get sent pptx files by their vendors.

And they send them back.

How do you think currencies are established? By accepting chickens and cows in lieu of legal tender? That’s precisely the meaning of legal tender. This is the exact analogue thereof: information is required as value is required, information and value are required in a mandated standardised form, other forms are rejected a priori.

Currencies are established by force (taxation backed by militaries and police)

Sure, the government could force a format change if they really want to.

Ultimately, yes: governmental actions are backed by force in the case of noncompliance.

I kicked Excel to the kerb in 2005 or something like that and have been a happy Apple Numbers and Wolfram Mathematica (and SPSS, PSPP, and R, and Python) user ever since.

Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company though.

I think the only way we can actually solve the problem is to get a FOSS product up to snuff with Excel. I use Julia if I need really elaborate number crunching, but I don’t view it as a substitute for Excel; the interactivity of spreadsheets is really useful, especially when you’re actively developing stuff.

For what it’s worth I’ve started building a Mathematica-to-Python transpiler.

“Anything you can do, I can do meta.” — Simonyi

Now I want to emulate my dual PIII-450 with an ATI Rage Fury 128 running Windows 2000.

Heh I had one of those back in the day with an Intel made L440GX+ and SCSI disks. One of my favourite machines.

Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.

Very cool! Never tried BeOS back in the day. I heard good things though.

Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.

I highly recommend you give Haiku a spin… the remake 25 years in the making and counting (which is several multiples the actual duration of the system it is “inspired by”, but that’s the nature of emulators and reproductions, isn’t it?). At any rate, it really gives the look and feel of the system as it was back then. The design is somehow peak late nineties distilled down into a powerful concentrate. (Make sure you click and hold shift to move the yellow tabs on the windows around.)

Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.

Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)

I don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.

I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.

Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.