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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I've also seen examples that are pushed way further than I thought possible. I'm thinking about some of the things people do in Excel.

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Spreadsheet is a form of programming, so you can build anything there.

Spreadsheets traditionally don’t support iteration (loops) or recursion. In Excel you had to go the VBA route for actual programming.

In my hands they do

In other hands, I have seen Excel spreadsheet hundred-products pricelists become a freaking tangle of merged cells, multiple rows for products, spelling mistakes, multiple spaces everywhere, and price cells hand-formatted. And I had to export the contents to machine readable .csv...

That sounds like a nightmare to untangle. On the other hand, it would be very satisfying to go from the original pricelists to a new, cleaned format!

That is the spirit.

In the distant future:

    $ ./myapp.xlsx --port 8080
    My App listening on port 8080
    Loaded 1337 rows

The future is now with Microsoft Excel Web Services, which is part of SharePoint.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-dev...

Not a common opinion, but one I happen to share.

Let’s see an HTTP server in an Excel sheet.

I didn’t check their claim, but https://github.com/michaelneu/webxcel:

“Webxcel creates a full-fledged RESTful web backend from your Microsoft Excel workbooks. It is written in 100% plain Visual Basic macros and comes with a lot of handy tools to help you build the next big thing.”

Ha! Sure beats the pure bash HTTP server. ;-)

Fairly sure Excel can get access to the entire .NET runtime.

Plus, someone made a MOV only compiler, soon...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/ex...

Calling user-defined functions (UDFs) from a worksheet is as simple as calling built-in functions: You enter the function via a cell formula.

That's a disingenuous take. You could write one, but it won't be allowed to connect to anything other than itself because Excel doesn't give it the network stack or IO it needs. Unless you use VBA, of course.

See https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html

Maybe just me but seeing side by side "spreadsheets are all you need" and ".ai" seem to be somewhat uh... competing claims.

It's a play on "Attention is all you need", the seminal AI paper.

The author of that website implemented GPT-2 inference on Excel

In 2010 I was working for a student computer support shop. We had web developers building our own ticketing system. In those days, I was told that everything in the UI was just tables. It was the only way they could get enough control on UI elements before div tags became widely spread.

Html tables are very different from excel tables. Fundamentally html tables were used because rows are a good way to split up the page vertically (you could have one row for the header, one for the content one for the footer). And columns are good for splitting it up horizontally (you could have one column for the side panel, and one for the content, and the last one for an obnoxious blinking ad).

I still love using tables in 2025 for webapps designed to run on old browsers. It's easy to render data into them (it's just headers, rows, columns) and they automatically have a cool, functional look (IMO).

Div tags were widely spread by 2010, though.

We were pretty far past the era of falling back to tables by that point.

Also 1x1 pixel spacer GIFs.

IE6 forced us to do crazy stupid stuff, like <div> </div> - and don't even start talking about

If we somehow manage to solve the two main spreadsheet downsides (imo): testing and change/version control, then spreadsheets would be a terrific programming paradigm.

As it is now I find it very powerful and empowering, but also scary.

I took a graphics programming class where one dude did a bunch 3d rendering stuff in excel.

Rather than try to understand, I decided he was into witchcraft.

IIRC, for a long time in the late 90s, Fedex was glued together with spreadsheets.

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