[0898]

I unknowingly met him once in 2002 or 2003, and I’ve just this second realised who he was.

I was visiting Microsoft Research in Cambridge writing an article for PC Format magazine, a British computer mag. They took me to see a few people to show off Microsoft Research.

There was this one guy who talked to me in his office. He got very excited about Haskell (which I didn’t know what it was) and he was also working on some Excel feature he was convinced of the brilliance of, but hasn’t persuaded the product team of.

His theory was that the only thing you know about an Excel spreadsheet is that most of your predications are wrong. My interpretation was that he was proposing a way of indicating a probabilistic range rather than a hard number.

I don’t know if this ever made it into Excel, or if indeed this was what he was talking about.

But it’s amazing to see this odd fellow I met was actually quite famous.

[gnufx]

That work might have been https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-user-...

Perhaps it's significant in context that a writer for a UK computing mag wouldn't know of SPJ. Would they know of any UK CS luminaries, like Hoare?

[0898]

Yes, that’s it. Good find. I’m the first to admit I was an IT dilettante, despite covering it.