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