mr w <wzr...@gmail.com> wrote: > With the era of Lotus-123 officially ending, I wondered whether > spreadsheets in general are still necessary. > Can any Factor users think of a computation more easily handled by a > spreadsheet than by a text editor and the Listener?
I used them for stochastic models (mostly linear systems with constraints); most business majors can read the results, and some of them are even trained well enough to follow the formulas and see how the inputs generate the results. A Turing-complete language is "more powerful", but by crossing the threshold from "data flow" (which is about all a spreadsheet can do) to "full programming language" a whole new world of complexity arises. Now, I would be delighted to use a Factor library that allowed me to lay out a business model as pure data -- that would get around some of the horrid inconveniences that attend the spreadsheet model (for example, adding an extra data element can be immensely disruptive, because the range that contains the data has to be redefined, and you get no warning at all if you fail to do so). But there are other applications that do this, and they haven't killed off spreadsheets even for this one use. BTW -- why is the era of Lotus 123 officially ending today? I thought it had been over for a decade, and Excel had taken over. I wish some of the alternatives to spreadsheets had managed to displace them, but I haven't seen any of them make any headway yet. -Wm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list Factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
