Konrad Hinsen 2025-09-01 05:41:14 📝 Issue 084: Spreadsheets
Welcome to the 84th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Spreadsheets. In this edition, we declare spreadsheets the most popular software programming environment of all time; in the Library section, we learn how to use Lotus 1-2-3 for science reading "Spreadsheet Physics" by Charles Misner and Patrick Cooney; and in our Vidéothèque section, we discover that Excel is a Turing-complete, functional programming language through the eyes of Dr. Felienne Hermans.
Nilesh Trivedi 2025-09-05 05:10:25 I am hosting an online mixer this Sunday for those who are building coding agents: luma.com/o26hrnb4
📝 Coding Agent Builders Mixer · Luma
If you're building Coding Agents using LLMs, this online meetup should help you connect with similar folks and discover ideas and opportunities.
Ivan Reese 2025-09-05 14:36:12
there's actually a surprisingly simple and useful definition of declarative language: a declarative language is any language with a semantics
[that]
has some nontrivial existential quantifiers in it.
What Declarative Languages Are
Eli Mellen 2025-09-05 15:09:36 But now I must ask, even after reading it, what is an “existential quantifier” and what is the distinction between trivial and non-trivial ones?
Andrew F 2025-09-05 21:15:57 Lovely.
Existential quantifiers are a standard part of predicate logic. "Trivial" seems a little dicier, yeah. I assume triviality means something like it's guaranteed to always exist and be easy to find. But I'd honestly be fine with a definition where declarativity itself is a sliding scale depending on the triviality of the existential quantifier. On that basis I might still count functional programs as only slightly declarative...
