Re Spreadsheets

Re Spreadsheets

[Dr. Robert Leif]

From: Bob Leif
To: Robert Dewar et al.
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Robert Dewar  wrote on Sat, 11 Jan 1997 16:20:30 -0500
Subject: Re: What is wrong with OO ?

SNIP

"People will learn what is at hand pretty
much regardless of whether something is easy to learn and use. After all
I am sure that far more programs are written using macro languages of
spread sheets, most of which are truly awful, very difficult to use, and
pretty difficult to learn. Nevertheless people do at least "sort of"
learn something regardless. Actually elsewhere in his article, Bjarne
complains of this phenomenon :-)"

"By the way just a quick note on spreadsheet languages. I saw a couple of
years ago a fairly comprehensive study of spread sheet programs (if you
don't think of spread sheets as a programming language, then you don't
know what people are trying to do with these programs :-) It showed that
over 50% of production spread sheets in use at Fortune 500 companies
that were studied contained serious errors. Now of course any such survey
is subject to concerns about sampling stability. Still one would think that
such a result would spread wide alarm, but as far as I can tell everyone
shrugged and continued ("it must be the other guy who has all the errors,
I am sure my spreadsheets are fine!")"

Snip
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I totally agree with Prof. Dewar's statements concerning spreadsheets.
However, the utilization of spreadsheets is one of the causes of the lack
of great profitability and the limited sales and use of Ada compilers.
Compilers are at the top of the software pyramid. They are only used by the
developers, who though limited in numbers, produce the applications which
are sold to the huge end user market.

The vast majority of people who program do not use compilers. They use
spreadsheets.  Unfortunately, none of the existing spreadsheets have had
Ada's requirement that they be based on software engineering principles.

There was a discussion at Tri-Ada '96 concerning "The Future of Programming
Languages". I made a mundane comment on the importance of spreadsheets,
which was ignored. I have previously argued (1) that formal => actual
parameter Ada syntax  for subprogram calls was excellent for a macro
language.

If AdaSAGE or similar program were to include spreadsheet functionality,
then an Ada product would meet the very significant commercial need of a
business software development product which can be easily maintained,
tested, and audited.

The Improv spreadsheet, which was terminated by Lotus, was the only one I
know of that had even a small beginning of a rational design. It, at least,
employed user definable field names for the columns and unique identifiers
(primary key) for the rows. Improv also kept the formulas separate from the
cells.  A strongly typed spreadsheet should distinguish between columns and
rows which contain data and those which contain the results of
calculations. The underlying data should be persistent objects in a
database and the spreadsheet should be a way to manipulate the data in the
database including serving as a design tool for the database.

(1) R. C. Leif, "Commercializing Ada". ACM Ada Letters 16 pp. 44-45 (1996).


Robert C. Leif, Ph.D., PMIAC,
Vice President & Research Director
Ada_Med, A Division of Newport Instruments
Tel. & Fax (619) 582-0437
Please send e-mail to my new address, rleif@rleif.com
Thank you.