Real spreadsheets for real programmers

Spreadsheets as a computing metaphor have received desultory attention from the programming languages community. Efforts to map real problems onto the metaphor however, have been hampered by serious flaws in the design and implementation of commonly available packages. We show that the intuition behind such efforts is sound; we define a spreadsheet mini-language, then use it to program solutions to some well-known problems. Since our minilanguage is in principle highly concurrent, we conclude that correctly constructed spreadsheet languages can offer both intuition and access to parallel computational resources to their users.<>