From my recent Twitter mentions: Build Systems à la Carte (2018). This presents a theoretical analysis of build systems (which they have defined broadly enough to include Microsoft Excel) and how to pick and choose the various properties they provide.

This came up because I am promoting a conceptually similar unified theory of Reactive UI, which also has things in common with build systems. In fact, Svelte also happens to cite Excel as an inspiration for its approach to incremental updates. My blog post on this went live yesterday, and a birdie tells me it will hit the HN front page later today.

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2018/0...