#2453: Excel Lambda

[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!