[cr0sh]

> Do we really want to start trying to write applications in Excel? Can you imagine the horrible spaghetti code that would result in? Imagine how much code you're going to have to write to express even mildly complicated concepts? Imagine trying to maintain one of these beasts.

Have you not worked in business much? Or software development (or b2b software development, or vertical integration software development, or...)?

Everything you mention in these few sentences has already come to pass, almost as soon as Excel was released. You would not believe the ungodly horrors we software developers have seen since then...then been forced to maintain, or re-write, or attempt to document.

/sob

I once found an ANN implemented as a set of Excel worksheets - thankfully, this wasn't a real-world system, but rather a tutorial designed to help teach ANNs to those with only Excel knowledge...but I know that someone - some manager, likely - somewhere out there - has chosen to add this beast into his or her own Excel worksheet system, and that it lurks, waiting like Cthulhu for a hapless sacrificial victim.

[orclev]

Sadly yes, yes I have. One of the very first professional projects I worked on was a system to replace an Excel spreadsheet because they were having issues with locks when trying to concurrently modify it on their network share. The project requirements where literally "implement what Excel does", and the answer to any question about the program behavior was "What does Excel do? Do that". On the one hand it was wonderfully simple and a great opportunity to play around with Backus-Nauer forms and the guts of an interpreter. On the other hand spending months re-implementing Excel rather than solving the actual problem was rather soul destroying.