Spreadsheets are Code
summary
Claim: spreadsheets are Turing complete — a full Turing machine is implemented in Excel formulas and visualized, and a working selection sort in Excel is built using only formulas. Research shows only one in three spreadsheets have documentation, spreadsheets pass through about 12 people over ~5 years, and ~10% of formulas act as ad‑hoc tests. Tools include a grammar/parser on GitHub, a refactoring tool and the Expector test plugin (running in a user study) that detect smells and generate runnable tests.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:15Spreadsheets are Code
- 0:49Programming Domains
- 1:13Why Spreadsheets
- 2:06Turing Machine
- 4:32Live Programming
- 5:23Functional Programming
- 6:07Everyone knows this stuff
- 6:54Selection Sort
- 9:16Dollar Sign
- 9:53Swap
- 11:18Copy
- 11:53Minimum
- 12:36Offsets
- 13:31Pop Quiz
- 14:09Intersection
- 18:22Poetry
- 19:39Row Function
- 20:13Indirect Function
- 21:43Previous Row
- 22:37Index Swap
- 23:18The Idea
- 25:13The Conclusion
- 25:37Examples
- 25:53refactoring
- 28:53test formulas
- 31:17coverage
- 34:52user test
- 35:26summary
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