[OliverM]

The clause "it's absolutely necessary for all but the simplest toy examples" is what I was disagreeing with. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that visicalc adopted one as soon as it was technically feasible in later versions.

[airstrike]

visicalc is not the benchmark you think it is. it's decades old. this day and age, dependency graphs for any real world use case will definitely need a dependency graph. it helps no one to suggest otherwise, and actually makes light of a specific engineering task that will for a fact be required of anyone looking to build a spreadsheet engine into a product

[OliverM]

I'm not suggesting otherwise. I'm saying that your "toy example" comment is very dismissive of something that was an extraordinary accomplishment of its day. They invented spreadsheets without it. Dependency graphs are excellent and widely useful things we should all be happy to adapt and reach for, far beyond spreadsheets. We should be grateful that they're available to all of us to build into software products so readily. I've used them repeatedly and I'm sure I will many times in the future.

What I'm trying to communicate is this: this product _invented_ spreadsheets, but you dismiss the implementation with a sneer.

[airstrike]

I didn't dismiss Visicalc at all. In fact, I even said it had fantastic success.

I dismissed the article's claim that maintaining a dependency graph is overkill for a spreadsheet. That's a false statement. It might have been true at the time, but it's not true today. The phrase as written in TFA is poor form and misleading to beginners.

[izacus]

[flagged]

[dang]

Whoa, can you please not cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are? We've had to ask you this more than once before.

I don't want to ban you because you've also posted good things, but bad things do more badness than good things do goodness. Unfortunately.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

[airstrike]

Few things are more arrogant than telling someone you're teaching them a lesson...

This is a product from 1979! It does not prove me wrong at all. Trade offs are different today. Decisions that applied then don't apply now. The quoted text from TFA is wrong and simplistic.

[izacus]

Give it up man.

[vor_]

That's cringy.