Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?

Besides the author whipping out the old, apocryphal 'QWERTY is the worst layout on purpose' factoid, very cool. The thing in Excel that always made my eyes bleed was nesting IF statements: the else block is passed as the second argument, leading to ridiculous bracket requirements. I suppose the way the devs would have you do it is put one IF per cell in some hidden cells, and SUM the results.

In short, Excel is powerful, but requires contorting your brain to get stuff done. It's like MS tricked the world into teaching millions of non-technical people BrainFuck.

There are some interesting bits in the LtU discussion of this article a few years ago, though I wish it would've continued a bit longer: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2710

And, an HN discussion of a more negative article about Excel as a programming environment, focusing on the fragility and bug-proneness of Excel models that have become widespread in the financial sector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5198187

I have previously used a spread sheet to: implement a Runge–Kutta integrator and simulate a pendulum, and implement a back propagation neural network.

Both times I had previously tried and failed to implement them in a proper language. Errors were had to debug in a batch process (loss of energy in pendulum, no learning in the NN). Excel/OpenOffice was great for being able to instantly propagate state through N steps, whilst simultaneously debugging the transition function of said state. Once my formulas were correct I translated it to a better language of course.

Thought the OP meant the actual 3D game engine in Excel 97.

Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM

One of the last easter eggs!

Actually Excel VBA is even more powerful - one can load the DirectX library and then do "real fast" 3D :D

This paradigm of data streaming trough operations instead of a sequence of instruction operating on data is called dataflow programming : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

People have been kind of abusing Excel since at least the mid-90's, using it for all sorts of things that weren't its primary intended use. I know there are several sites dedicated to games that run in Excel. Despite the slow decline of the desktop, the Microsoft Office user base is still in the 100's of millions, and with that many people you end up seeing some pretty amazing and funky stuff. I've been selling a text-to-flowchart Excel add-in (FlowBreeze) for years, so I'm just as guilty as anyone.

I love this. To me it's coming full circle. As someone who felt like they graduated to programming from Excel, I often get peeved by people who use Excel like Paint with numbers. How many times have you seen someone doing calculations by hand and entering them into rows, making pretty spreadsheet pictures with colored cells, or completely ignoring the most simple functions like SUM (much less SUMIF).

Now here they have ratcheted up the complexity several degrees... and why? to paint a picture. Cue the Lion King.

Spreadsheet is a great model for software.

I hope designers iterate on it more in the future, with better engineered and more domain-specific products than excel.

Anyone remember the demo "Excelence by BraadWorsten Brigade" made in excel 2003 that used double buffering for animation? Really neat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H...!

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53021

This is relevant: http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/2013/04/interview-cary-wa...

It's a turn-based RPG in Excel.

Pfft... my wife used to write side scrolling shooters with self learning AI enemies using Clipper on DBase III. You can use anything to write a game if you put your mind to it.

Instead of using Excel, look into reactive programming.

Would this be possible with Google Docs?