Did you know that there are companies that use VBA, Microsoft Excel's extension language, for floating point numerical computations, in real life, not as a joke?

Did you know there are companies that make tens of thousands of dollars a year off the results of these computations?

How do I know this? I WORK AT ONE, OH GOD screams like Sam Kinison

Yeah, there's even a product out there that compiles an Excel spreadsheet into optimized machine code, and apparently people do buy it.

I find the idea of non linear programming to be pretty interesting. I sort of do this in Lisp, I program in terms of specific functions, but once I'm in the function programming becomes linear. I can do this less effectively in object oriented languages such as Java, since I have to write a whole class at a time. Some might call non linear programming top down or bottom up programming, but really it's about interest point based programming. Sometimes the interest points are at the top or at the bottom, but more often they are at some intermediary point in the complex tree or graph describing how your program works.

So, a 2D layout like Excel offers much more freedom, but I wonder if sometimes you'll want a 3rd dimension? And, if that's the case, is it possible to have a programming space that supports an arbitrary N dimensions, or N-N dimensions, ad infinitum?

Sure, it's probably possible, as certain types of cellular automata are turing complete. However, I've not seen anything more complex than a logic gate--no one thinks it's practical.

Back in the day, when I was working on handhelds, icons were always defined in some nasty bit-fiddly binary format. Masking was similar hard.

I ended up building (?) an Excel spreadsheet to do it for me. In some ways, it was almost the inverse of the technique in the link:

- one set of cells was used to "draw" the icon by filling them with "X"s

- another set of cells would glue together the values specified by each X into appropriate 32-bit integer values

- a final set (the coup de grace!) would grab those ints and bit twiddle them directly into a short line of legitimate c code, ready to be copied into a header file

Ha! But can it ray trace?

You can render fractals from a database ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130971 ) and stored procedure languages are powerful enough to generate .tga files.

Performance concerns aside, after reading this I wouldn't be surprised.