Re:Functional Programming et al. (Score 2, Informative)

While you are correct about the power of concurrent dataflow programming (ie excel ;), you are mistaken to suggest that this is not recognised by the FP community. A quick search for 'spreadsheet programming' on citeseer uncovered this: Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/396896.html Haxcel: A Spreadsheet Interface to Haskell http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/lisper02haxcel.html Uncovering Effects of Programming Paradigms: Errors in Two Spreadsheet Systems http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/tukiainen00uncovering.h tml Spreadsheet Model for Programming http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ambravaneswaran00spread sheet.html Unfortunately spreadsheets as they currently exist exhibit a striking level of bugs as they attempt to scale to larger systems[tukiainen00], the limitations are well know. Fortunately there is active research into addressing these issues (I've lost the citation, but I remember finding the papers on citeseer). Yes spreadsheets are a powerful FP mechanism; but there is still a lot of work left to do before they could be considered a candidate silver bullet.