Top all-time · #2051
Felienne Hermans
Personal blog · felienne.com/archivesprogrammingwriting
Felienne Hermans's personal blog at felienne.com covers programming and writing. Since 2013, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “Excel Turing Machine (2013)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Felienne Hermans' site for her research on spreadsheets as software: refactoring and analysing them, her PhD on Excel, her Turing machine in Excel, and talks on the topic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Excel Turing Machine (2013)5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-09-22
- Paper: Feminism in Programming Language Design3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-10-24
- /publications2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-05-09
- What science says about naming in programming2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-28
- /archives/29742 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-28
- Analyzing and visualizing spreadsheets2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-27
- Stop blaming spreadsheets (and take a good look in the mirror)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-05
- /archives/61502 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-01
- Stop blaming spreadsheets (and take a good look in the mirror)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-05-28
- Code Phonology2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-09
What Hacker News says?
Spreadsheets are a very good model, and they have tremendous potential (which has been fully utilized) due to their "visual programming" aspect, but the excel formula language, array formulas and VBA are not the best places to ramp up to when things get more complex and advanced. There's quite a bit of horror stories of Excel gone wrong [1] I've been positively suprised that Microsoft seems to have started to finall…
Comment linking /publications
on “Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code”Submitted What science says about naming in programming as a story · 93 points
HN discussionAh, fair enough. I mean, I'm not debating the power of Lisp, and it would be great first languages for someone not trained in programming. OTOH, there is of course the trade-off to make it as useful for as broad a selection of users as possible; Python has a lot more mind-share, and the SciPy ecosystem would be a great complement. If Excel adds some practical convenience functions to the global namespace, would it b…
Comment linking /archives/2964
on “Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback”Submitted On moving code from C# to F# as a story · 93 points
HN discussionExcel itself is functional and reactive already, wouldn't adding an FRP language on top of that be a bit superfluous? Check out Felienne Hermans' work if you haven't already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw http://www.felienne.com/publications
Comment linking /publications
on “Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback”Submitted Code Reading Club (2020) as a story · 89 points
HN discussion> it's the quantity of it that makes the difference. But as many people have pointed out, quantity can have, well, quantitative reasons. I remember a blog post stating that being the only woman among 100 men at conferences, the author always got at least one stupid comment/question. She even turned it into a formula: #(women at a conference) = inversely proportional to #(times I talk about women in tech) [1] Of cour…
Comment linking /archives/4828
on “Being a “dumb” girl in Computer Science”Submitted Excel Turing Machine as a story · 55 points
HN discussionObviously Sam from accounting did this before Excel was t urning complete. https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult... No metion of a cell-u-lite version.
Comment linking /archives/2974
on “A project with a single 11,000-line code file”Submitted Why feminists are so annoying as a story · 46 points
HN discussionIf we're talking about Spreadsheet programming, the work of Felienne Hermans [1] [2] (former mentor of mine) is definitively worth a read. She and her group have done a lot of research into how spreadsheets are used as software in companies and how software engineering research can be applied to them. [1] "Spreadsheets are Code" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY [2] http://www.felienne.com/publications
Comment linking /publications
on “Applying programming language research ideas to transform spreadsheets”Submitted History and Spirit of C and C++ as a story · 14 points
HN discussionI'm jus going to name-drop Felienne Hermans, who did an entire PhD on bringing proper software tools and best practices to Excel: http://www.felienne.com/publications Here is one of her more recent versions of the talk she gives on the topic: https://vimeo.com/162206549 I think she raises especially important points when she mentions that Excel is used everywhere , that it suffers from all the technical debt problem…
Comment linking /publications
on “Gallery of programming UIs”Submitted Stop blaming spreadsheets (and take a good look in the mirror) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionExcel and similar tools are never going to go away. It's just got too much utility for that. The best thing we can do is provide spreadsheet users with the same quality of tools as we ourselves are used to. I know a startup in the Netherlands working on just that, and it's a golden business opportunity with a large untapped market! http://app.infotron.nl/ http://app.infotron.nl/Home/Blog http://www.felienne.com/?cat…
Comment linking /?cat=15
on “The Importance of Excel”Submitted Excel Turing Machine (2013) as a story · 11 points
HN discussionDRAKON represents programs as flowcharts, and there's no reason why the underlying representation couldn't just be C, Python, or some other imperative language, and there's no reason why C or Python originally written in vi couldn't be represented in DRAKON. I'm not a fan of flowcharts but DRAKON is of historical significance. The same would apply to GRAIL. Other imperative visual programming languages such as Scrat…
Comment linking /archives/5210
on “Drakon: a visual language for specifications from the Russian space program”Submitted Stop blaming spreadsheets (and take a good look in the mirror) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wrote an answer to this on my blog http://www.felienne.com/archives/3355 and @seansickle Thanks for linking to my stuff!
Comment linking /archives/3355
on “You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work”Submitted A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design [pdf] as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNot to be too pedantic, but... Felienne Hermans actually implemented a Turing machine in Excel, without using scripting: http://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 There was an HN post about this in September 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416631
Comment linking /archives/2974
on “You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work”Submitted A Case for Feminism in Programming Language Design [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFelienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. ( http://www.felienne.com/publications ) Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" ( http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534 ) is particularly detailed. Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely…
Comment linking /archives/2534
on “You shouldn’t use a spreadsheet for important work”Submitted Paper: Feminism in Programming Language Design as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYeah you can, I made one here a long time ago: https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 :)
Comment linking /archives/2974
on “Excel as Code”Submitted Stop Blaming Spreadsheets (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe author of the book once made a Turing machine in Excel [1], which was called out by Microsoft when they made the Excel formula language Turing complete [2]. [1] https://www.felienne.com/archives/2974 [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...
Comment linking /archives/2974
on “Book Review: The Programmer's Brain”Submitted Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee https://www.felienne.com/public-appearances and ctrl-f for Excel. Especially the videos, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdfNvYPxkOY . Then have a gander at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/lambda-function-b...
Comment linking /public-appearances
on “'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel”Submitted Code Phonology as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
