Clojure Repl in Excel | Hacker News Reader

Clojure Repl in Excel

github.com

75 pointssea6ear13 comments

If you need to produce some spreadsheets from Clojure, there's a wonderful library by Tom Faulhaber lets you define a spreadsheet as a template, then simply turn Clojure data structures into an .xlsx file.

He gave a talk on it at Clojure West 2015 [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnJs79W0BDo

This may be a naïve question, but, if it is possible to install without administrator privileges (which we should be trying to get everyone accustomed to doing anyway), then why is it set up to install with them by default?

Very cool!

kinda funny: Visual Studio project. Excel on Windows. "__MACOSX"-folder in .zip-file ;)

Wow. whamtet must have had a very particular itch that needed scratching....

Is there any chance to have this working with the OSX version of Excel?

I don't know much about the Excel environment and ClojureCLR so I don't know if it's feasible at all.

Good to see ClojureCLR getting some cool usage. If only Visual Studio had some awesome integration like the Intellij Clojure plugin Cursive.

I was just lamenting about this not existing and how useful it would be. Woot!

Cool concept. Still don't think it's worth learning the lisp syntax for though.

Learning the Lisp syntax takes (quite literally) 2 minutes. Getting used to the Lisp syntax however...

Agreed. I think people sometimes use "syntax" to mean the entire package—code as data/data as code, immutability, functional transformation over data structures as opposed to mutation of objects and so on and so forth.

The syntax is literally,

  (verb arg1, arg2… argn)

and you're more or less done. The other stuff, however…

You're not a hacker as your name indicates. You should be interested in learning new things beyond your current understanding, and lisp has an amazingly rich history and rich future if I should say so myself. Live up to your name. You may find joy in that.

I really dislike that kind of attitude, even though Clojure is one of my favorite languages. There are so many things to learn in software and computer science, and programming languages -- even programming paradigms -- are a very, very small minority of them. Maybe the GP prefers to learn about data structures, optimization algorithms, scientific computing or OS design rather than new languages?

I actually find that learning new languages is among the laziest, and least important things to learn in software and CS.

Please don't put down other developers over what they choose to learn.

He seems to prefer talking about Lisp syntax instead of learning.

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