Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Factorio is a genre-defining game, and I think the number of clones is a testament to that.

Factorio is often compared to programming, but it's closer to Excel where the logic and the output live in the same space. The game does a great job letting the user build with programming-like constructs without them ever having to understand any theory.

View on HN

Excel has been dryly noted as the most popular functional programming language before: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3033912/functional-languag...

In Excel you can't modify existing state in a cell, but only transform and output the results in a new cell.

You can change the evaluation semantics to allow cyclical references and either a max number of cycles or a stability parameter. This allows you to solve differential equations in excel. While this isn’t quite what you described, it’s closer than the default behavior.

Excel might spur users more to not separate code from data, but you can do so. Nothing prevent users from having one sheet for raw data input, one for output layouts, and the businesses implemented in dedicated formula sheets or VBA modules.

On the other side, within any programming environment, you can entangle your data, output layout and businesses code and thus create an unmaintainable mess.

I tend to disagree, there are some obvious aspects of programming in the game: refactoring spaghetti, converting monolith into microservices, multiprocessing, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com