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I'd like to know if there exists a spreadsheet application which uses an existing functional-programming language to define functions.
I've already heard about Resolver One which uses python, but I'm more interested in anything which uses a purely functional language like Haskell.
Thanks
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Thanks to functions, Excel has become one of the most popular development tools. Many businesses are built on top of Excel spreadsheets, with code that's been written by folk who don't know that they're developers, let alone that they're using what at heart is a functional programming language.
Functional programming has historically been less popular than imperative programming, but many functional languages are seeing use today in industry and education, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Wolfram Language, Racket, Erlang, Elixir, OCaml, Haskell, and F#.
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Excel forms part of the Microsoft Office suite of software.
With the addition of custom functions that can call each other and recursively call themselves, Excel's formula language becomes Turing-complete, effectively meaning that Excel users can compute anything without resorting to another programming language.
Spreadsheets are quite a popular application among functional programmers. They have been a recurring theme in papers over the years. Some of the more memorable papers include
Spreadsheet Functional Programming by David Wakeling (2007).
Forms/3 by Margaret Burnett and many others (2001)
Implementing Function Spreadsheets by Peter Sestoft (2008)
You can also read about an effort to make Excel more functional.
For each of these papers I have either read the paper or heard a talk based on the papers. None of the papers is fabulous but all of them are good. I think the one with the most interesting ideas is by Sestoft—and his experimental results are pretty amazing.
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