Users might see it as a good thing to have yet another feature, but this sort of type-softness is why Excel is bad. In general having every feature is a bad thing, you need constraints to design things, to have idioms.

Making everything flexible is what allows you to make spaghetti that nobody understands.

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qubex 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I shall embark upon a quest, and the quest’s object shall be thus: to define multiple lambdas within a list, and thereupon, to make cells downstream depend upon the lamda’s, and to make them in turn become lists or values, and so on, until the whole thing breaks.

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shakna 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you've got five minutes, you'll be able to crash their Python integration. Probably without trying to do so.

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knollimar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

won't you get nested arrays not supported? or maybe you thunk it out, idk

	▲	qubex an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

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spbaar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Excel does not need to be as opinionated or portable as a programming language. This might actually be a lesser of two evils considering what type of user behavior it encourages. (I've heard a similar ethos behind certain design decisions of Go)

	▲	Grombobulous 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The flexibility of Excel is a lot of its value. If it wasn’t flexible like this then how could it be so widespread as a general purpose business tool? Excel allows and embraces whatever mess you want to make.

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seemaze 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Microsoft is actively harming the laypersons comprehension of their data with 'features' such as this.

Reasoning about the basic shape of data with real estate managers using the Btrieve[0] database on DOS (and then XP) in years gone by was noticeably more straight forward than wrangling the monolithic excel monstrosities encountered today.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrieve

	▲	qubex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.