[HN Gopher] Lambda: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions
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Lambda: Turn Excel formulas into custom functions
Author : lelf
Score : 135 points
Date : 2020-12-05 21:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcommunity.microsoft.com)
| croes wrote:
| Yeah, let's make the moloch even more unmaintainable. Does still
| have the leap year error to be compatible with Lotus?
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| This lets you do things like localize a complex formula to one
| spot that might otherwise be used many times within a workbook.
| How does that make things more unmaintainable?
| djeiasbsbo wrote:
| What bothers me greatly about Excel is something that native
| English speakers perhaps have never had to deal with.
|
| The "keywords" are language specific/dependent. Everytime I
| have to google how to do a specific thing in Excel I then have
| to spend 5 times longer to translate the instructions into my
| language.
|
| It is a problem because in a locked down corporate environment,
| a worker/user cannot easily change the language.
| vic20forever wrote:
| I think the Functions Translator[1][2] add-in might be worth
| a look to you. Note: I haven't used it myself, and it's a
| Microsoft Garage project, so there's no guarantee of support
| or maintenance.
|
| From the description:
|
| Functions Translator helps people use a localized version of
| Excel by helping translate from the US Excel function names,
| or research how to create a solution on the web with
| predominately English content.
|
| Easily find the equivalent localized functions and formulas
| in any of the supported 15 languages. Functions Translator
| will automatically configure the language settings to US and
| the Localized version, and people can provide feedback on the
| translation of functions if it is not what they expected.
|
| [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/blog/2018/03/new-
| gara... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/garage/profiles/functions-tr...
| kqvamxurcagg wrote:
| I use excel a lot and I think I'll struggle to find a use case
| for this.
|
| As others have mentioned, this is essentially a user-defined
| function. I generally shy away from these as it will make it
| difficult to share spreadsheets with others as they may not even
| know what lambdas are. Auditing lambdas will be a nightmare, as
| will tracing dependencies.
| infogulch wrote:
| Wow this is cool! I felt that something like this could be
| transformative to excel for some time.
|
| 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8116224
|
| > spreadsheets might be an interesting programming environment if
| you were restricted to the native functionality with a small
| addition. Namely, add a new value type: "anonymous function,"...
|
| 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356824
|
| > Excel needs exactly one thing to blow open the doors on
| productive programming: a new "function" data type. Since it's
| just a data type, you put it in a cell just like any other data
| type. Have some way to call it, like `A1(arg1, arg2)` or
| something. Now you can leverage the full capabilities of Excel to
| manage it, name it (named ranges), etc just like other data. ...
|
| From the same thread:
|
| > VBA is just an escape-hatch to a 'real' programming
| environment; my claim is that excel sheets & formulas alone could
| _be_ a 'real' programming environment in its own right, no
| escape hatches necessary.
|
| I wonder if my comments inspired someone. :3
| MauranKilom wrote:
| So, who'll be the first to build a Y-combinator in Excel?
| ehejsbbejsk wrote:
| They need to support Python.
| askvictor wrote:
| They (MS) have been talking about for a while:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/7jti46/ms_is_consid...
| Yet to see anything tangible though.
| mdm12 wrote:
| With Guido being a Microsoft employee now, that may just
| happen...
| dsalzman wrote:
| I hope they add an import and export function to this. Ideally
| you could sync these functions at an org level via O365.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Then you need version control. Better to let the document be
| the boundary of consistency.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Or support versioning using GitHub! Excel has always been a
| powerful repl, these extensions are leveling it up.
| geogra4 wrote:
| This would make Excel 100x more maintainable. I would think
| a nice Github integration would turn excel closer to a
| maintainable programming language.
| [deleted]
| oger wrote:
| While I welcome this development I must note from long-standing
| experience that using any type of more advanced functionality in
| Excel has always come back to bite me. The reason is exchange of
| workbooks with less skilled individuals. Or cross platform
| incompatibilities like URLENCODE not working on MacOS since many
| years now. And many use cases that once required Excel can now be
| solved by other tools with better documentation. The nature of
| Excel is in-auditability, intransparency and error proneness.
| Trust me - I've been using it for too many years now.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Brings back all the Blockspring [0] vibes... You could create any
| cloud functions invoking external APIs and run them in Excel, so
| you could literally do anyhing.. My favorite use-case was pulling
| data from internal PRIVATE APIs to do statistical
| analysis...having up-to-date data every time you hit the refresh
| button was clutch! You could build dashboards inside excel with
| real-time data and save old data to do time-aware analysis of all
| kind stuff - literally speeding up so much time. Everyone knew
| how to use Excel, but very few people knew how to get API data
| into it by themselves.
|
| Anyone else was a huge fan?
|
| [0] http://blockspring.com/
| omneity wrote:
| We're bringing back some of that magic ... and more!
|
| https://monitoro.xyz
|
| (disclaimer, I'm the founder)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's cool. How does it work with website Ts & Cs, which
| generally don't like scraping?
| zupa-hu wrote:
| This is a game-changer level feature. I have been dreaming of
| this and more other power features for a long while.
|
| Well, except for the Name Manager part in their implementation,
| which seems to be a total disaster. I really hope this is a first
| version and they are going to keep improving it as they say. One
| should really define the functions in the cells and be able to
| reference them like =A1(2). The last thing a beautiful functional
| environment needs is globals.
|
| Super curious what the future of Excel holds.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Does Google sheets let you do anything like this?
| cdolan wrote:
| Yes it supports JavaScript functions that can be called in the
| formula bar.
|
| However Google sheets is nowhere the install base of excel, so
| this is a really big deal
| Closi wrote:
| Excel already has the ability to write custom functions in
| Javascript (and VBA), this is the ability to write them in
| the formula language rather than JavaScript.
|
| (So no, Google Sheets does not support this)
|
| The latest improvements in Excel really do seem to be re-
| widening the gap between Google Sheets and Excel (Dynamic
| array formulas, Let, Custom data types, powerquery
| improvements...)
| ttul wrote:
| Is it not, though? Google Sheets is available to all GSuite
| customers. GSuite is the most popular email hosting platform
| in the world, with roughly 18% market share (Microsoft 365
| trails not significantly far behind).
|
| I think Google Sheets has a pretty solid user base.
| cdolan wrote:
| GSuite and Office 365 subscription base, while somewhat
| correlated to, is not equal to the usage of Excel vs Google
| Sheets.
|
| Highly anecdotal, but there are far more complex business
| processes still running in Excel that are not going to be
| translated over to Google sheets, and they are all offline
| behind a network firewall.
|
| Those types of sheets will really benefit from this
| improvement.
|
| Now if they just supported python instead of VBA for
| scripting!
| TuringNYC wrote:
| That is literally how Google Sheets started (excel2web allowing
| lambda functions, hosted externally) before being acquired by
| Google.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| As a frequent user of Excel, I very much welcome this. Being able
| to build a function library beyond User Defined (UDF, VBA
| functions that can be called from a formula) and a Personal.xlsb
| file (VBA that's available in any open Excel file)
|
| One common use case this helps takes the general form "If A2+B2 >
| 10,then A2+B2, else 10". "A2+B2" needs to be updated, it has to
| be updated twice. Alternately, you could have a "helper column"
| C2=A2+B2, but this adds clutter to the whole spreadsheet.
|
| I have a number of UDF's which lend themselves well to this, such
| as a triangular distribution calculator. Execution through Lambda
| should allow the undo stack to continue working (normally ditched
| by executing VBA) and hopefully give a performance boost.
| sheetjs wrote:
| For that type of pattern, you can also use the new LET
| function: LET(myval, A2+B2, IF(myval>10,
| myval, 10))
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/let-function-3484...
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| Thanks! Haven't sunk my teeth into the new round of features
| yet, but have found great utility from the last batch
| (unique, filter, sort) and the prior batch.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Isn't that just =MAX(A2+B2,10)? Anyway I know what you mean. It
| seems fine to make a sheet that behaves as variables. Ie a
| sheet that is two columns, the comment for an intermediate and
| its values. Reference it elsewhere. Re-engineering the whole
| Excel as a website, with its attendant sandboxing, seems to be
| the future.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| This reminds me of the IFERROR().
|
| Without IFERROR, a common pattern would be
| IF(ISERROR(A2+B2),0,A2+B2).
|
| With IFERROR, you can just do IFERROR(A2+B2,0)
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| And IFERROR() wasn't added until Excel 2007. The other way
| to make that operation less unwieldy if the expression was
| complicated, to avoid repeating it I'd put that inside
| another cell, and that way it would be
| =IF(ISERROR(C2),0,C2), but IFERROR is a much better
| solution.
|
| Excel is such a good tool in many ways, and such a bad tool
| in many ways. Really experienced power users can follow
| Excel formulas much easier than blocks of imperative code.
| But the more complicated it gets, the harder it can be to
| follow it all. But that also goes the same for software,
| too. I do think that there is something powerful about the
| "debugging" you always have turned on in Excel, in that you
| always know what value a formula has produced, even after
| it has run. And you can (usually) easily see at what point
| an error started in your calculations.
|
| For the programmers out there who aren't fans of Excel, or
| aren't super familiar with it, if you haven't seen "You
| Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky" [0] you might be pretty
| amazed at what you can do with Excel at an
| intermediate/advanced level.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| "to avoid repeating it I'd put that inside another cell"
|
| 100%! I like to do that in other cases as well, just to
| keep formulae simple enough that someone else can easily
| audit the whole spreadsheet.
|
| I'd rather have 5 extra columns in a calculation, then
| have a huge formula in a single column. This habit is so
| strong that I often do the same thing with Pandas: adding
| extra columns to a dataframe for intermediate
| calculations, when it would be better to write a larger
| function and .apply() it all at once.
| will_pseudonym wrote:
| Yep. Exactly the same reason we break up procedures and
| functions into smaller units in procedural code, to be
| able to reason about individual pieces, and understand
| each step.
|
| I've never used Pandas, but I imagine I'd have the exact
| same instincts to break calculations up as you do, since
| Excel was my "first programming language" that I was
| first exposed to in the 4th grade, haha. I certainly
| didn't learn much advanced stuff at that point, mostly
| because of the time period and being in a rural Midwest
| area there weren't a lot of programmers around to learn
| from and the internet was rather different in the mid
| 90's. :) But Excel planted the seed of programming in my
| mind, even though I didn't know what "programming" was.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| Yes, that was a max function. I was trying to keep it simple
| for people not familiar with the syntax.
|
| I commonly use a lookup function in that context (vlookup,
| xlookup, or index/match).
| askvictor wrote:
| I can see this being a good thing; but would really like to see
| both debugging and inbuilt testing (could be done right in the
| name manager - a box for inputs and expected output)
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| They hint at something like this coming in the comments.
|
| _Do you have plans in foreseeable future to bring those
| features? Formula formatting, debugging (at least with F9),
| code navigation (jump to function definition, etc) and so on._
|
| _I completely hear you on this one! I can 't share more about
| what we are doing in the future but I will say that I
| definitely share your sentiment. I would love to see us add
| much needed tools for debugging and authoring formulas. Akin to
| what you get with great IDEs._
| ttul wrote:
| The number one reason that I use Google Sheets instead of Excel
| is the availability of the REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT functions.
| No human should forced to use a ridiculous combination of LEFT,
| RIGHT, and MID to extract things from a string. I just can't
| fathom why Excel hasn't yet introduced regular expressions.
| cdolan wrote:
| Agreed. I would love to leverage REGEX!
|
| Excel formulas have long been too hard to comprehend if you
| were not the original author... and even if you did author it,
| 4 weeks later you won't remember how it worked without a half
| hour of review!
| chaz6 wrote:
| Whilst not native, you can emulate these with a user defined
| function (UDF).
| cm2187 wrote:
| Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as soon as
| they hear "regex" (including me), I am not sure regex will
| bring much to regular users. If it is hard to developers, it is
| impossible to regular users. (And if you really want regex,
| there are hundreds of results on google on how to build your
| own VBA UDF to get it).
| aidos wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with a small extract or substitute
| regex, in my opinion.
| craftinator wrote:
| > Given the number of developers who spit on the floor as
| soon as they hear "regex"
|
| > If it is hard to developers, it is impossible to regular
| users.
|
| What are you talking about? Regular expressions are used
| everywhere. On the backend it's text parsing, on the front
| end it's input validation. I have never written a complete
| application without using it. You're also the first person
| I've heard grumble about them.
|
| I get that if regex is used in an overly convoluted or messy
| fashion, they become unreadable and unreliable. Just like
| assignment operators, nested division, or any other basic
| programming construct. But they are also remarkably powerful
| at solving simple pattern matching in a robust way. I
| recommend you go learn them instead of making baseless claims
| about "the number of developers who spit on the floor" when
| talking about them or whatever.
| kaishiro wrote:
| Just to throw another anecdote on top of yours, I've never
| worked in a shop where they weren't grumbled about from
| time to time - so I personally don't find the parent's
| claim to be baseless at all.
|
| Many developers struggle with the "language" of regex - and
| no matter how many times I "learn it", it doesn't change
| the fact that I have to pull up references every time I'm
| building out an expression.
|
| Grandparents post re: Excel had me curious actually -
| because I (personally) find the use of Left, Mid, Right,
| etc generally far more logical and readable than trying to
| parse a regex string.
| bombcar wrote:
| Every time I have to use Regex I muddle through various
| tutorials and try stuff until it seems to work.
|
| A horrible but practical way to use them.
|
| Being able to describe them in an Excel-like fashion and
| have it spit out a working Regex would be nice.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Its much easier than the legacy garbage that many office
| users are stuck with.
|
| My guess in my organization (huge, 100k people) we probably
| have ~50 FTEs who do stupid work solely because of this
| feature not existing.
| somurzakov wrote:
| same developers don't like SQL because it's complicated (or
| rather they don't understand it) and end up using an ORM
| mess.
|
| yes still SQL is everywhere
| cm2187 wrote:
| I was under the impression the primary use for ORM isn't
| because SQL is complicated (it really is not) but rather
| because it is embedded in strings and therefore un-testable
| and opaque to the compiler.
|
| And the complexity of SQL to someone who already codes is
| marginal. Here in Excel we are talking about the complexity
| to someone with no coding experience.
| samatman wrote:
| The motive behind ORM is in the name: it is to Map
| Objects to Relations.
|
| The promise is that a Java (then Ruby) developer, could
| simply design the objects needed for the program, and the
| fields which need to be persistent could be automatically
| mapped to the database using ORM.
|
| The reality is quite different of course, there's a
| reason ORM is so widely derided. But ORM is more about
| skipping the bookkeeping involved in setting up
| persistence for application code, rather than testability
| or opacity of SQL.
| geocar wrote:
| I love the branding "custom functions without code" right before
| a bunch of code.
|
| Reminds me how early word processors (the person, not the
| software) were convinced to program word processors (the software
| this time) just by calling the programs "macros".
|
| I'm not joining Microsoft's beta program right now, but I'm
| curious if anyone knows the data type of a =LAMBDA?
| bitwize wrote:
| In the 1970s, secretaries wrote their own extensions to Emacs
| in Lisp. They were only ever told they were "customizing" the
| editor, not programming it!
|
| (This was Multics Emacs, a predecessor to GNU Emacs.)
| protomyth wrote:
| "Customizing" is something everyone loves to do in a lot of
| aspects of our lives. Programming is for those weirdos in IT.
| Building stacks in HyperCard wasn't programming either it was
| just writing interactive presentations.
| indymike wrote:
| Hmm. A lambda platform that just runs spreadsheets. This is a
| killer idea.
| skrebbel wrote:
| This makes me unreasonably happy. Does anyone know how much time
| there usually is for Office stuff to go out of beta?
| jtsuken wrote:
| Microsoft: Hey, we have this new feature. It's called Macros. You
| can execute any code you like and use it as functions in your
| spreadsheets.
|
| Users: Great! Let's start using it everywhere!
|
| Users: Hey! Our spreadsheets have become very slow and hackers
| break into our systems by executing arbitrary code in our
| spreadsheets
|
| Microsoft: OK! From now on you will have to save workbooks that
| can execute arbitrary code in a dedicated file format, which will
| only open after showing 15 warning messages.
|
| ....
|
| Microsoft: _Hey, we have this new feature. It's called Lambda.
| You can execute any code you like and use it as functions in your
| spreadsheets._
| tzm wrote:
| Allow me to reminisce.. in 2012 I created a JavaScript VM
| extension that executes custom functions inside native Excel.
| The extension also had a corresponding web-based front-end for
| creating apps that read/write directly to Excel. This was my
| baby, but investors (ie, YC) didn't think it was disruptive
| enough. Now I see these apps (ie, AirTable) pop up every month.
| Should I open source it?
| xupybd wrote:
| If you open source it you can't sell it. If you couldn't sell
| it anyway you might be able to make some money supporting it
| as open source.
| layer8 wrote:
| The problem with "macros" is that they can be arbitrary VBA
| code that can invoke OS functions and foreign applications.
| Lambdas can only invoke Excel functions that you can invoke
| anyway from any Excel cell. Lambdas merely add an abstraction
| mechanism, they otherwise don't provide access to new
| functionality.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| This is what they said:
|
| new capability that will revolutionize how you build formulas
| in Excel
|
| Which isn't really true. I can call macros using the
| =function(x) capability like forever.
| Closi wrote:
| The differences seem to be:
|
| * You can write it in one language (excel formula language)
|
| * The language is simpler and known by almost all users,
| while Javascript and VBA are only used by a tiny proportion
| of users.
|
| * The language is more secure (i.e. you can't execute
| arbitrary code, access files, call DLLs etc)
|
| * Because of the above, users don't need any security
| permissions / get warnings when running it.
|
| * Because they are standard excel formulas, you get OOTB
| support for other excel features such as dynamic array
| formulas and access to the full catalogue of worksheet
| functions (even in VBA, Application.Worksheet only had
| access to a few basic excel workbook functions, so if you
| wanted to do a Xlookup for example you are implementing it
| yourself with arrays and loops)
| layer8 wrote:
| Macros are not "formulas in Excel", lambdas are.
| slowwriter wrote:
| Adding to what others have replied, the difference is
| simply put: If you can write your custom function as a
| lambda instead of a VBA function you will not have to save
| your Workbook as XLSM (M for Macro). That means no warnings
| when the user opens it and much better security because the
| lambdas can only call built-in functions and other lambdas.
|
| To be honest, I think this is awesome and has been sorely
| missed.
| wtvanhest wrote:
| It's absolutely true. Most spreadsheets in BigCo are viewed
| by at least 3 or 4 people. No one likes it when they open a
| spreadsheet from someone else with a macro because it
| dramatically increases the learning curve.
|
| If you just had custom functions, you can trace them back
| pretty quickly and end up with an understanding. Teams will
| also probably create 'known' custom functions for their use
| case, like converting account Chart of Account codes to
| finance COA codes etc.
| danso wrote:
| This is completely orthogonal to the full scope of LAMBDA, But it
| did make me laugh to see that the first example involved a
| classic and painful usecase (extracting 2 letters amid a string
| of numbers), which in Excel has to be written as:
| =LEFT(RIGHT(B18,LEN(B18)-FIND("-",B18)),FIND("-",RIGHT(B18,LEN(B1
| 8)-FIND("-",B18)))-1)
|
| But if only Excel would support regular expressions like Google
| Sheets [0], could be done as easily as:
| =REGEXEXTRACT(A2, "[A-Z]{2}")
|
| I'm sure adding regex isn't a trivial thing, but simple pattern
| extraction seems such an absolutely massive usecase for every
| everyday user that just I cannot fathom why Microsoft won't
| support regex. It would make Excel vastly more powerful for its
| purportedly non-coding users, especially since GSheets has had it
| for years now. Maybe someone on the product team believes regex
| feels too much like "code"? As a triple nested function involving
| subtr, strlen, and array indexing _isn 't_?
|
| [0] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3098244?hl=en
| [deleted]
| craftinator wrote:
| > I'm sure adding regex isn't a trivial thing
|
| Actually, adding that into the list of Excel functions would be
| trivially easy. The hard part would be convincing all of the
| managers that it won't dramatically increase the amount of work
| they need to do in terms of tech support.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The regex is perhaps still clearer (and in general more
| powerful), but that Excel method is a catastrophe, not the way
| it has to be done. =MID(B1, FIND("-",B1)+1,
| 2)
| shostack wrote:
| I always felt VB code and macros were buried away somewhere that
| made it hard for less technical people to use.
|
| This seems like it lowers the learning curve for, at the very
| least, adding DRY principals to more every day use cases.
|
| I consider myself fairly comfortable in Excel. The number of
| times I've been burned in my own (or more likely shared)
| spreadsheet by things like copying down a formula that got
| modified in one instance but not all and related issues is
| staggering.
|
| Being able to have some cells where core logic lives makes it
| easier for less technical people to understand what's going on,
| and makes formulae a lot more reusable.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They sort of already had this with the old style pre-VBA Excel
| macros.
| JoBrad wrote:
| This might be better, though. Because it lets you use the same
| spreadsheet functions, in the spreadsheet. It would be trivial
| to make a lamdha function that encapsulates several spreadsheet
| functions into one.
| ky3 wrote:
| Apparently, the research literature calls this feature Sheet-
| Defined Functions (SDF). Doesn't it use this result from
| Microsoft Research UK that was just recently published in ICFP
| 2020:
|
| Elastic Sheet-Defined Functions: Generalising Spreadsheet
| Functions to Variable-Size Input Arrays
|
| https://icfp20.sigplan.org/details/icfp-2020-papers/46/Elast...
|
| Fastest beeline from research lab to the end-user I've ever seen.
| CrazyCatDog wrote:
| Here's hoping that the capability will be available for online
| excel (which otherwise pales in comparison to the pc client
| version)!
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| It sounds like this is indeed the case.
|
| "As you've probably noticed, we are improving the product on a
| regular basis. The desktop version of Excel for Windows & Mac
| updates monthly, and the web app much more frequently than
| that."
| bencollier49 wrote:
| A lot of this sort of functionality which is appearing at the
| moment from MS was built into a fantastic spreadsheet called
| ResolverOne which was released back in around 2008 by a company
| in the UK called Resolver Systems. It was based on IronPython and
| allowed an entire spreadsheet to be exported as a Python package.
|
| The company never seemed to gain traction, and unfortunately the
| open-source tool released which was based on ResolverOne had none
| of the power or elegance of the original.
|
| I'd be interested to know if MS had consulted Giles Thomas from
| R.S. prior to this - it's certainly giving me a bit of deja vu.
| rrjjww wrote:
| As someone who sends .xlsx files back and forth with clients
| often, I'm most concerned about compatibility if I start
| integrating this into my worksheets. It sounds like those clients
| that haven't updated to the latest Excel will receive a mess of
| #CALC errors.
|
| Otherwise an exciting development.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Lambda is kind of a weird name. Lambda functions are
| (traditionally) anonymous and close over local variables. These
| are just UDFs in Excel syntax, which seems like nothing super
| exciting (surprised it didn't exist already).
|
| I'd be curious what an actual lambda thing would look like in
| Excel.
| ripley12 wrote:
| =LAMBDA(...) does return an anonymous function - and then you
| use the Names Manager to name it.
|
| It is a bit weird and confusing because you currently can't
| really use the anonymous functions without naming them, but
| maybe they're going to relax that restriction eventually?
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah, I was expecting you to be able to define a lambda in a
| cell, so like `B1` could be `=LAMBDA(x => $A1 + x + 1)`. Then
| you could assign another cell say `D1` to like `$B1($C1)`.
| Drag-filling B1 down would make say `B2` equal to `=LAMBDA(x
| => $A2 + x + 2)` or something, so that it would work like
| people would think Excel Lambdas should.
|
| That would be more along the lines of lambdas in the
| traditional sense of anonymous functions, closure captures,
| higher order functions(?), etc. Could be cool, but IDK if it
| would be useful? Can't think of any specific use cases right
| now, but perhaps once people get used to it, there would be
| tons of them.
| [deleted]
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| The article also says this is valid within the grid:
|
| _One last thing to note, is that you can call a lambda
| without naming it. If we hadn't named the previous formula,
| and just authored it in the grid, we could call it like
| this:_
|
| _=LAMBDA(x, x+122)(1)_
|
| Edit: typo
| ripley12 wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I added a qualifier. I can't see that
| being much use outside of testing/debugging functions,
| since it would usually be simpler to just write that
| without the LAMBDA call.
| rajandatta wrote:
| This is extremely significant to simplifying spreadsheets.
| tgv wrote:
| Yes, but there is no mention of debugging. In the hands of
| Excel cowboys, this can become another foot gun.
| bombcar wrote:
| A number of bugs will be solved by moving to it (a copied
| function is typo'd in one cell, etc) and you can test it
| pretty easily in a cell.
|
| Excel is basically a REPL with cells.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| A REPL treated as a software system.
| bombcar wrote:
| I see it making spreadsheets easier to convert into code, too.
| Many "business programs" begin as a spreadsheet.
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| We have services which run a "notebook as a service" so it's
| not too far fetched to think of Microsoft doing this with
| Excel spreadsheets. I bet it would take the business world by
| storm and would be a good move.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Next up: Excel functions running as Azure Functions in the
| cloud.
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