April 21, 2021
#2453: Excel Lambda explain
[In a narrow panel, Ponytail is walking in from the left, looking down at her phone]
Ponytail: Oh cool, Excel is adding a lambda function, so you can recursively define functions.
[Ponytail, holding her phone to her side stands behind Cueball, who is sitting in an office chair with a hand on a laptop standing on his desk. He has turned around to face her, leaning with the other arm on the back of the chair.]
Cueball: Seems unnecessary.
Cueball: When I need to do arbitrary computation, I just add a giant block of columns to the side of my sheet and have a Turing machine traverse down it.
[In a frame-less panel Ponytail is standing in he same position behind Cueball, who has resumed working on his laptop with both hands on the keyboard.]
Ponytail: I think you’re doing computing wrong.
Cueball: The Church-Turing thesis says that all ways of computing are equally wrong.
[Ponytail is still behind Cueball, who has a finger raised in the air, and the other hand is on the desk. Cueball’s head has a visible sketch layer which has not been erased.]
Ponytail: I think if Turing saw your spreadsheets, he’d change his mind.
Cueball: He can ask me to stop making them, but not prove whether I will!