LAMBDA. Is MS Excel now a full fledged programming language?
Microsoft’s researchers believe they’ve now finally transformed Excel into a full-fledged programming language, thanks to the introduction of a new feature called LAMBDA. “With LAMBDA, Excel has become Turing-complete . You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language,” a Microsoft blog proclaimed. “Being Turing complete is the litmus test of a full-fledged programming language,” explained a Visual studio magazine article. And it adds that “early community response has been encouraging,” noting that Microsoft researchers are enthusiastically envisioning skilled Excel users creating functions “that appear seamlessly part of Excel to their colleagues, who simply call them.” As Microsoft Senior Researcher Jack Williams described it at POPL 2021, “In Excel, it is now possible to build real, full-fledged programming experiences… We can now start to build things that look like real programs.” Microsoft’s Research blog calls this new ...