Pure Functional Programming in Excel • Felienne Hermans • GOTO 2016
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters point to it whenever Excel, spreadsheets or functional programming come up, as a fun and serious take on spreadsheets as real programming.
What it is
Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2017 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec rzzzt · 2020-05 · on “History of Logo”
OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): [this video]
Recommends vanderZwan · 2017-12 · on “Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback”
Excel itself is functional and reactive already, wouldn't adding an FRP language on top of that be a bit superfluous? Check out Felienne Hermans' work if you haven't already: [this video] [LINK]
Recommends brohee · 2020-08 · on “Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates”
You may enjoy "Pure Functional Programming in Excel" by Felienne Hermans presented at GOTO 2016 [this video]
Recommends ggrrhh_ta · 2021-02 · on “The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook”
This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: [this video] I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.
Recommends robertknight · 2024-01 · on “CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadsheet compiler”
Related to this, I recommend Felienne Hermans' talks on Excel as a functional programming language - [this video] .
Cites molsongolden · 2021-04 · on “Spreadsheet is a software development paradigm”
Also see the research of Felienne Hermans and her talk “Pure Functional Programming in Excel.”[1] [1] [this video]
Cites vanderZwan · 2025-03 · on “New Zealand's $16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet”
And once again Felienne Hermans is proven right about the world running on spreadsheets and that we should take them a lot more seriously for that reason alone. [0] [this video]