![]() ![]() I don’t really count writing new functions in JavaScript here because end users just can’t do that. You can only write formulas that call the existing built-in 600 functions that are part of Excel. Excel’s formula language, considered as a programming language, is terribly limited. Moreover, it’s more widely used than any other programming language on the planet. When I first joined Microsoft 22 years ago, my first question was how can a functional programming researcher make an impact at Microsoft? So I soon zeroed in on Excel because Excel’s formula language is precisely a purely functional programming language. ![]() In a presentation from the Calc Intelligence team, Jones explained the r ationale behind the new evolution of Excel’s formula language as follows: Simon Peyton Jones, a major contributor to the Haskell functional programming language and researcher at Microsoft Research, noted that the Excel formula language may be the most popular functional programming language in use in the world. ![]() The Excel community has already started to put the feature to use. With the addition of custom functions that can call each other and recursively call themselves, Excel’s formula language becomes Turing-complete, effectively meaning that Excel users can compute anything without resorting to another programming language. LAMBDA lets users define custom functions using Excel’s formula language, rather than JavaScript or VBA. Brian Jones, head of product for Excel, recently announced LAMBDA, a new capability added to the Excel formula language. ![]()
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