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by zaphar 1456 days ago
This is unfair and a far too narrow definition of programming language. Excel sits very squarely in the functional reactive language space. Just because most of it's users don't "know" they are programming and most of our common tools don't work with it doesn't change the fact that it has pretty much all of the building blocks that any programming language gives you. Are there domains where Excel is awkward to use? Absolutely. The same can be said about pretty much any programming language.

Excel deserves to have the label of programming language even if it shuns that label due to it's target audience.
2 comments
capableweb 1456 days ago
I guess what I was trying to say that Excel as commonly known, is a programming environment, rather than a language. Where you can use the "Excel" programming language for performing most (if not all) tasks a general purpose programming language can.

But it's still a bit like saying "Eclipse" is a programming language. You can do programming in Eclipse, that is true, but you can also do other things that are not programming, which makes Eclipse a programming environment. Just like with Excel.

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zaphar 1456 days ago
I don't think this is a true dividing line for a programming language. The Smalltalk language for instance combines both the programming environment and the language together. I don't think anyone seriously argues that smalltalk is not a programming language.
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igouy 1456 days ago
Seems like equivocation — Smalltalk is a programming language when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming language and Smalltalk is a programming environment when we're using "Smalltalk" to mean Smalltalk the programming environment.
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zaphar 1456 days ago
Either way it is still entirely valid to refer to Smalltalk as a programing language.
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igouy 1456 days ago
As-long-as you actually mean a "narrow definition of programming language" otherwise you're saying one thing while meaning another.
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igouy 1456 days ago
The label of programming language goes to Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/exc...

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zaphar 1456 days ago
Excel has conditionals and several forms of map/reduce which stand in for loops all without relying on VBA. I stand by my statement that Excel qualifies in everyway that matters as a programming language.

They avoid that label because of their target audience but the label absolutely applies.

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