[dahart]

Excel has a new function called LAMBDA, which makes Excel Turing-Complete. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...) If you haven’t gotten there yet in your CS classes, Turing-Complete means you can compute anything that is computable, so provably as powerful as any other language.

Turing-Complete doesn’t say anything about convenience though, there are always reasons to play with embedding your favorite language into your other environments, so don’t let prior work stop you from playing and exploring! You will earn yourself many benefits by trying to do it yourself.

Excel, BTW, was fairly powerful as a programming environment even before the LAMBDA function, there have been multiple examples of crazy applications written in an Excel spreadsheet, video playback, games, ray tracing, etc. Here’s a ray tracing example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20764825

[hanche]

Excel’s lambda is still only avaiable in beta versions, I think? At least, I haven’t seen it yet, and I have been looking.

[ska]

> Turing-Complete doesn’t say anything about convenience though,

e.g. c++ template mechanism, also Turing complete.

[junon]

CSS is also turing complete (given some assumptions).

[captn3m0]

There’s a nice list here if surprisingly Turing Complete stuff: https://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete

[inawarminister]

Is it theoretically possible to build a LISP-style language on top of Excel's LAMBDA function like Clojure did on top of Java/JavaScript and Hy on top of Python? Might prove to be an interesting venue...