Spreadsheet functional programming

Wakeling, David

doi:10.1017/s0956796806006186

Cited by 17 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Sprego (Spreadsheet Lego) is a methodology to teach spreadsheet management while developing the students' computational thinking and algorithmic skills (Wing 2006) without forcing the use of the ever-increasing number of problem-specific functions (Csernoch 2014;Csernoch et al 2014;Csernoch and Biró 2015a, b, c). The methodology focuses on twelve general-purpose functions (Table 1) and encourages students to build up algorithms of well-known programming principles (Wakeling 2007). In the usage phase (ACM and IEEE report 2013), students code their algorithms by using composite array formulas in the functional language of spreadsheet programs, which is announced as the latest built-in feature of recently published spreadsheet versions (Microsoft 2019c;Williams 2019).…”

Section: Spregomentioning

confidence: 99%

Sprego: case study on the effectiveness of teaching spreadsheet management with schema construction

2019

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In the modern, information driven society managing and handling data is unavoidable. The most common form of data handling is to organize data into tables and complete operations on them in spreadsheets. Sprego (Spreadsheet Lego) is a programmingoriented methodology focusing on schemata construction and authentic problemsolving working with only a limited number of general-purpose functions. In our current study the goal is to present Sprego as an alternative method for spreadsheeting, and to measure its effectiveness in education compared to the traditional surface approach methods. We also aim to highlight the advantages of teaching datamanagement, spreadsheeting, and introduction to programming by applying an algorithmic and schemata centric method in a user-friendly interface. The teaching and testing were carried out in three classes of a local middle and high school with two experimental and one control groups. Based on our results, it is found that the Sprego methodology is significantly more effective than the traditional surface approach methods. Furthermore, it is also proved, in accordance with similar studies in sciences, that students, who had studied traditional spreadsheet management in advance to this experience, have difficulties switching to Sprego. Although these students alternate between the two approaches, our measurements clearly prove that the traditional approach is pushed into the background, as students prefer to solve problems using Sprego. Our findings also imply that traditional methods do not develop long-lasting knowledge which students could rely on, and have a negative effect on their development, while Sprego seems much more reliable.

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Section: Spregomentioning

confidence: 99%

Sprego: case study on the effectiveness of teaching spreadsheet management with schema construction

2019

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“…There is also a number of papers which discuss various methods to support highlevel design of spreadsheets, in particular [15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Some of them consider spreadsheets from the functional programming perspective.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating Relational Queries into Spreadsheets

Sroka

Панасюк

Stencel

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.

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Spreadsheets are among the most commonly used applications for data management and analysis. Perhaps they are even among the most widely used computer applications of all kinds. They combine in a natural and intuitive way data processing with very diverse supplementary features: statistical functions, visualization tools, pivot tables, pivot charts, linear programming solvers, Web queries periodically downloading data from external sources, etc. However, the spreadsheet paradigm of computation still lacks sufficient analysis.In this article we demonstrate that a spreadsheet can implement all data transformations definable in SQL, without any use of macros or builtin programming languages, merely by utilizing spreadsheet formulas. We provide a query compiler, which translates any given SQL query into a worksheet of the same semantics, including NULL values.Thereby database operations become available to the users who do not want to migrate to a database. They can define their queries using a high-level language and then get their execution plans in a plain vanilla spreadsheet. No sophisticated database system, no spreadsheet plugins or macros are needed.The functions available in spreadsheets impose severe limitations on the algorithms one can implement. In this paper we offer O(n log 2 n) sorting spreadsheet, but using a non-constant number of rows, improving on the previously known O(n 2 ) ones. It is therefore surprising, that a spreadsheet can implement, as we demonstrate, Depth-First-Search and Breadth-First-Search on graphs, thereby reaching beyond queries definable in SQL-92.

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“…A recent paper on integration of spreadsheets and a functional language gives another example of using higherorder functions [10].…”

Section: Higher-order Function Sheetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing function spreadsheets

Sestoft

2008

Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on End-User Software Engineering

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A large amount of end-user development is done with spreadsheets. The spreadsheet metaphor is attractive because it is visual and accommodates interactive experimentation, but as observed by Peyton Jones, Blackwell and Burnett [6], the spreadsheet metaphor does not admit even the most basic abstraction: that of turning an expression into a named function. Hence they proposed a way to define a function in terms of a worksheet with designated input and output cells; we shall call it a function sheet.The goal of our work is to develop implementations of function sheets and study their application to realistic examples. Therefore, we are also developing a simple yet comprehensive spreadsheet core implementation for experimentation with this technology.Here we report briefly on our experiments with function sheets as well as other uses of our spreadsheet core implementation.

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Spreadsheet functional programming

Cited by 17 publications

References 17 publications

Sprego: case study on the effectiveness of teaching spreadsheet management with schema construction

Sprego: case study on the effectiveness of teaching spreadsheet management with schema construction

Translating Relational Queries into Spreadsheets

Implementing function spreadsheets

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