Felienne Hermans

Excel and similar tools are never going to go away. It's just got too much utility for that. The best thing we can do is provide spreadsheet users with the same quality of tools as we ourselves are used to. I know a startup in the Netherlands working on just that, and it's a golden business opportunity with a large untapped market! http://app.infotron.nl/ http://app.infotron.nl/Home/Blog http://www.felienne.com/?cat=15

I'd add nuance to Hermans' work. Its not all experiment blind, but also not feedback-less. They advocate for "direct instruction", not just rote learning. > As that is not a surprise, since research keeps showing that direct instruction—explanation followed by a lot of focused practice—works well. Note the "lot of focused practice". [0] https://www.felienne.com/archives/6150

https://youtu.be/bdfNvYPxkOY. And https://www.felienne.com in general, at least where spreadsheets are concerned. Two monitors - one for Excel, one for the VBE - is not Smalltalk, but it is productive. At least for n=1, since the '90s.

Spreadsheets are a very good model, and they have tremendous potential (which has been fully utilized) due to their "visual programming" aspect, but the excel formula language, array formulas and VBA are not the best places to ramp up to when things get more complex and advanced. There's quite a bit of horror stories of Excel gone wrong [1] I've been positively suprised that Microsoft seems to have started to finally improve this situation with things like XLOOKUP and increasing Python support in Excel. Disclaimer: I've published in a group doing research on Spreadsheet improvements, this is the professor's publication history [2] [1] http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm [2] https://www.felienne.com/publications

I'm jus going to name-drop Felienne Hermans, who did an entire PhD on bringing proper software tools and best practices to Excel: http://www.felienne.com/publications Here is one of her more recent versions of the talk she gives on the topic: https://vimeo.com/162206549 I think she raises especially important points when she mentions that Excel is used everywhere, that it suffers from all the technical debt problems that regular software development suffers from, and that buggy Excel sheets have big consequences (the austerity paper bug comes to mind[0]). So even if "real" programmers don't want to program in it, it still should be taken seriously given its place in the world. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-18/faq-reinhart-rogoff…

Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. (http://www.felienne.com/publications) Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" (http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534) is particularly detailed. Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool. There is an excellent video with her on InfoQ, explaining her spreadsheet formula refactoring tool Bumblebee (and the F# code behind it): http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring

> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference. But as many people have pointed out, quantity can have, well, quantitative reasons. I remember a blog post stating that being the only woman among 100 men at conferences, the author always got at least one stupid comment/question. She even turned it into a formula: #(women at a conference) = inversely proportional to #(times I talk about women in tech) [1] Of course, that formula has simple quantitative reasons. Let's say that constant 1% of the 100 men there want to talk about women in tech. If there is 1 woman, you're it. If there are 2 women, 50% chance, 3 women 33% chance etc. Same with rude people. Let's say there's an even 1% of women and men who are rude to the opposite gender and they are equally prolific. If there are 10% women at the conference/company/..., a woman has a roughly 100x greater chance of encountering that type of behaviour. Even though the level of rudeness is exactly the same. Approximately: 1100 people, 1000 males, 100 females. 1% rude makes 10 rude males per 100 females, roughly 10% chance; 1 rude female / 1000 males, 0.1% chance, 100x difference. Considering that "badness" of rude behaviour is likely going to be on a bell curve, you not only get more bad behaviour, you also get worse behaviour. Just from he numbers. So you can have outcomes that look subjectively sexist (women encounter much worse and/or much more bad behaviour) without there actually being any sexism. [1]…

Good that you asked, I found even worse wastages of your taxpayer money. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/1d69a970-812a-4325-bb98-b2… Or let's talk about our own field: https://www.felienne.com/archives/8470 Everyone knows how ridiculous anti-science, anti-logic, and anti-progress propaganda has gotten. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in bad faith rhetoric. Aside- the right had all the chances to be the side of science and logic, given how left-liberals deny genetics and realities of evolution. Alas, they have worse issues.

Parsing shell-like syntax using turning complete excel to be able to parse shell-like syntax is step up from asci programming, but certainly drives home why would want to use a lexer. IMHO, Fortran language implienter has nicer real world experience on why would want to use things like lex/yacc. Suggest grouping associate shell command to excel function name that calls the turning tape that does the requested shell command (perhaps one excell spreadsheet per turning tape?). aka turing shell recursive decent parser. https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 && https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-exc… Although, IMHO, might want to upgrade the turning complete excel stuff to support a less verbose grammer type 1 or type 2 first.

Yeah you can, I made one here a long time ago: https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 :)

Backwards compatibility. VisiCalc only did approximate lookups (http://www.felienne.com/archives/3980. Also a good article on the problems of this default) Yes, they could have made the argument required, and have their file converter add it, but users typed in formulas from magazines at the time, so that wouldn’t have worked there, unless they added UI for it.

"http://www.felienne.com/archives/5452" leads to "Error establishing a database connection".

There's a "smoothscroll.js" loaded by the page. Looks like it only targets Chrome users. http://www.felienne.com/wp-content/themes/zerif-lite/js/smoothscroll.j…

Well, she seems to live in the Netherlands ( see http://www.felienne.com/about-3 )...

nice. they forgot to mention Excel. http://www.felienne.com/archives/2974

If there is a specific discussion direction you have in mind, you should put it forth. That clip helps add more context, for sure. I don't have much to add, but I'll state that I adore Papert's vision, and that even those who disagree about "what we should do on Monday" should keep an eye on the vision. If it does not directly inform what steps to take in the short term, at least it should have an indirect influence. By a similar token, tearing everything down and trying to rebuilding it from scratch carefully is famously tempting and notoriously ineffective for software systems. Even with software it's hard to make that claim flat out, and I shouldn't dare try to draw an analogy to social systems, since, you know, revolutions happen and for good reason. But I am glad there are at least some people (though maybe there are relatively too many) with an eye toward incrementalism. There are many similar ideas to Papert's and Kay's that could perhaps be organized under a theme of being visionary or radical or in stark contrast to the status quo. Coming to mind are: A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart [1] (2002) or much more narrowly Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Before Teaching Differential Equations by Gian-Carlo Rota [2] (1997). I'm also reminded of some work by Felienne that questions the idea that computer programming in particular is not amenable to traditional instruction. This idea is popular with this era's programmers (perhaps because for the most part, at…

DRAKON represents programs as flowcharts, and there's no reason why the underlying representation couldn't just be C, Python, or some other imperative language, and there's no reason why C or Python originally written in vi couldn't be represented in DRAKON. I'm not a fan of flowcharts but DRAKON is of historical significance. The same would apply to GRAIL. Other imperative visual programming languages such as Scratch could also be stored in a form resembling a textual imperative language. In other words, the visual element is largely "syntactic sugar". Dataflow programs can also be stored as text rather than binary, but due to the nature of dataflow, this would be inconvenient to program directly in. This is because dataflow programs are graphs with only a partial order rather than ordered lists like programs in C or Lisp. This means that visual dataflow languages, such as LabVIEW and my own Full Metal Jacket (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html) aren't simply syntactic sugar. There are textual dataflow languages such as SISAL, but these require a compilation step before code is actually dataflow. You should not be surprised to find that version control systems designed for text in which lines of code are executed sequentially by default is less useful for stored visual dataflow programs. You could still use diff/merge on the stored representation at the function level, but not easily at the line level, because the visual representation doesn't have…