Compare "Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel": http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...

Well, a Reactive Functional programming language.

Everything is mutable by default, but changing one variable automatically updates all dependents.

This style is also getting more popular elsewhere, and with RxJava and RxAndroid nowadays you can even use it on android.

What, and give up Excel/VBA? More seriously, an F# IDE baked into Excel would lead to spontaneous Snoopy-dancing in the finance IT trenches.

We've had a Haskell-clone baked into Spreadsheets at Standard Chartered Bank for a while.

What about this? Not affiliated or even tried it, but came upon while looking for something else in the past.

http://fcell.io/

I agree wholeheartedly. Common wisdom states that 'spreadsheets don't scale' but I wonder if that is because we haven't built good enough tools to facilitate that. Imagine if developers developed in spreadsheets and as much effort went into creating new paradigms within them as has gone into programming language design.

See "Improving the world's most popular functional language: user-defined functions in Excel": http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...

The beauty of the spreadsheet is that people don't even realize they are programming.

You can even add another layer of abstraction that people seem to do OK with, which is "Goal seek". Excel will tweak an input cell until the output cell reaches a given condition.

> Excel will tweak an input cell until the output cell reaches a given condition.

Never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself? ;)