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by zmj 5179 days ago
Casual programming happens in Excel every day.
1 comments

Indeed -- as long as the problem domain is "strings and numbers", and doesn't require any I/O. That's a pretty small fraction of the things I actually need to do. What would his 7-line shell script look like in Excel?

The great thing about functional languages is they have no side-effects. The lousy thing about functional languages is they have no side-effects. :-)

Thats true, but people use other worksheets as kind of declarative IO areas (that they print). And Google Docs is a big improvement as your spreadsheets get URLs and so enter into the outside world.