Prof. Simon Peyton Jones is a computer scientist who specialises in functional programming languages. He is most known for being one of the designers of Haskell, and a lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Peyton Jones currently works at Microsoft as a Senior Principal Researcher. He has also been heavily involved in advocating computing education reform, and he is the Chair of Computing at School.

Prof. Andy Gordon is also a computer scientist working at Microsoft Research, and in addition he is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on programming languages, and he leads the Calc intelligence group, which, among other projects, works with Microsoft Excel to improve Excel as a programming language

The world’s most widely used programming language is a purely functional language! It’s called Excel. No mutable cells, assignment statements, or sequencing; just pure functions and immutable values. But, despite its phenomenal success, considered as a programming language, Excel’s formulas are very limited: they are largely restricted to scalar values, and you can’t write new user-defined functions.

Until now. Excel has just released LAMBDA, in its full higher-order glory, just as Alonzo Church defined it in the 1930s. That’s pretty exciting, because now you can define new functions, which can call other lambda-defined functions, to arbitrary depth, and even recursively. It represents a qualitative change not an incremental one: Excel just became Turing-complete.

In this talk, Prof. Jones and Prof. Gordon will sketch out what lambda calculus is and why it is important to the foundations of mathematics and logic. Moving from theory to practice, they'll show the amazing things you can do using lambda, with Excel as our demo vehicle. On the way, they’ll describe the journey that led a few geeks at Microsoft Research Cambridge to influence one of the most widely used programs in history, and they’ll show you some other ideas we’ve been playing around with.

No prerequisites are required.

This talk was held jointly with the University of Cambridge Competitive Programming Society (UCCPS). UCCPS aims to bring together the community of competitive programmers in Cambridge while raising the profile of the sport. They host lectures by a variety of exciting speakers, as well as regular programming contests. For details, please visit https://uccps.soc.srcf.net/ .

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