part oneManaging People

oneMY FIRST BILLG REVIEW

FRIDAY, JUNE 16, 2006

In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. "Excel Macros," we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short, it was almost completely unmaintainable. It had advanced features like "Goto," but the labels were actually physically invisible.

The only thing that made it appear reasonable was that it looked great compared to Lotus macros, which were nothing more than a sequence of keystrokes entered as a long string into a worksheet cell.

On June 17, 1991, I started working for Microsoft on the Excel team. ...

Get MORE JOEL ON SOFTWARE: Further Thoughts on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.