Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets

Amazing, I did avoid hell to collegues by implementing some form of counter in VBA. My most prized coding contribution. 8 lines that evaporated hell (filtering 1000 rows in Excel to find duplicates) into fun.

stereobit2• 9 years ago

This is how I started as well. But we had too many typos so I had to find something a little bit 'smarter'.

Next thing on my list is to implement tf–idf to help with free text categorisation.

k__2• 9 years ago

This reminds me of my work at a big corp.

The admins didn't allow my team too much software, especially no compiler or something, but(!) they allowed MS Office.

So what happened was, that we started to program everything we need in VBA, with Word, Excel or Access as base, depending on the needs.

emteycz• 9 years ago

Yeah, very usual, and these companies make me very happy - they make exceptionally well paying customers when they critically need to redo everything into a "normal" application.

foobarbazetc3• 9 years ago

This is the case at a lot of places.

I know of global banks where billions of $ gets moved about by updating Excel spreadsheets.

Musonius• 9 years ago

That's unbelievable and got me intrigued, please expand.

SubiculumCode2• 9 years ago

I sincerely hope you are trolling.

mbaha• 9 years ago

This cannot be possibly true :o. Please expand.

conductr2• 9 years ago

I did this when I worked at JPM Chase in 2008; not as developer but as an analyst on treasury side. I executed $B daily of margin trades through an Excel macro.

Not very sophisticated. Each row in the spreadsheet was a trade. The loop would just send commands to a 1970s-era mainframe terminal application. Everything had to be executed in order, just like a human using the keyboard to enter the trades manually. The trades required several calculations, and you'd have to enter the results in terminal screen to execute the trade. Other analysts had been doing those calculations one by one on a calculator next to their mouse. The efficiency being, they didn't need to switch between apps on their PC.

This macro only existed because I built it. They didn't like it much, they wanted me to do it manually. I said OK and kept using the macro anyway. I quit after ~6 months out of boredom.

stephenhuey2• 9 years ago

I can believe it. Once upon a time, a friend of mine at one of the largest oil companies told me how they were passing around a complex spreadsheet with tons of tabs and formulas and it was for managing the budgets of all their chemical plants around the world. I tried to explain how I could just put it all into a database and whip up a front end for it, but he said there's no way a consultant like me could get anywhere near his department since all firms had to be vetted extensively, there'd be a big RFP, etc, and anyway it sounds like they thought Excel was just fine for managing all this money.

cctan• 9 years ago

I find this hard to believe, maybe on bank loans or something, but billions of funds transfer?

facepalm

TuringNYC• 9 years ago

I was encouraged to use Excel/VBA by our official Auditors and Advisors at a Fortune 500 public company. The rationalization was (whatever you might make of this):

- Excel is generally "contained" without too many external dependencies (not really true, but truer than others...)

- Excel is easily auditable (true for excel formulas, less so for VBA, but sure, better than Perl etc)

- Excel is easily versioned and frozen (some truth to this)

Obviously none of these answers are universally correct, but there was some truth to this. And Auditors/Advisors are generally more concerned about risk mitigation than other goals.

indigochill2• 9 years ago

This may sound silly, but I don't think I've actually seen a more elegant functional visualization of how computers work at that level. I could see this being used as an educational aid to introduce students to the key concepts.

ZoFreX4• 9 years ago

If you like this you might also like the games "Human Resource Machine" and "TIS-100", which both give a similarly visual insight into how computers work.

michaelmior• 9 years ago

Links below. Worth noting that both of these are included in the Steam Summer Sale which ends in a couple hours.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Mach...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/TIS100/

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

Yes! I played HRM, and the optimization challenges were challenging even for someone that teaches low level programming.

rcar• 9 years ago

Also worth checking out is the free web game BOX-256 where you use a toy assembly language to draw stuff: http://box-256.com/

diggan• 9 years ago

In fact, all Zachtronics games are awesome and programming/logic inspired. If you use steam, I would highly recommend getting the bundle that is currently on sale: http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2925/The_Zachtronics_Pu...

My favorite of all of them is SHENZEN I/O though, as it's a bit simpler than TIS-100 but more programming focused than both Infinifactory and SpaceChem. All of them are fun though.

indigochill2• 9 years ago

I enjoy TIS-100/Infinifactory/Shenzhen IO. Nevertheless, I don't think any of those games represent all the key elements quite as explicitly, like the stack pointer and how the stack and heap build up. In terms of games with that level of detail, the only one that comes to mind for me is https://microcorruption.com/ which displays exactly what's in every register and in memory at all times. But I think playing it requires a little familiarity in advance.

rrauenza• 9 years ago

My son and I went through this excellent interactive 6502 tutorial after completing HRM: https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

wolfgke3• 9 years ago

"TIS-100", which both give a similarly visual insight into how computers work.

You know that TIS-100 was originally planned to be a very different game:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/244969/Things_we_create_t...

'The story of how TIS-100 came to Early Access this week starts where many development stories end: with an idea for a sprawling, grandiose game that proved too impractical to live.

“Years ago, I came up with this game idea called The Second Golden Age,” says Barth. It was basically a cyberpunk thriller set in a future Middle East crawling with nanotechnology other weird future tech.

“You'd be an engineer, and you'd be dabbling in all these different technologies; you'd be designing all these tiny little devices that could like, go into your bloodstream, and it'd be a super-cyberpunk engineering game,” says Barth.

The idea was to build an open world filled with different kinds of puzzles for the player to solve, a bit akin to Myst. Multiple systems of puzzles would be in play -- all of the chemical engineering puzzles in SpaceChem would be akin to one distinct subset of puzzles in Golden Age, for example -- and players could learn things about the world and advance themselves by mastering various puzzle mechanics. as the player could explore a virtual world filled with different kinds of puzzles to solve. Recently, Barth took a shot at making his idea a reality.

“We were really deep in production on Infinifactory, and I really wanted to ‘go indie’ -- even as an indie developer -- and make something on my own, to prove I could still do that,” recalls Barth. “Because now I don't make anything by myself, right? We have between 4-7 people on our team full-time, plus a bunch of external people. I wanted to see if I could make something -- not by myself, because I still didn't -- but at least with a smaller team.”

So Barth set out to try and recapture something of his past by crafting his Second Golden Age with some collaborators, designing a game with a story and five different puzzle games within it before realizing "Oh god, I can't make another game. There's so much work here! It doesn't make sense, it will cost a fortune to make the art, I just...I don't have time for this."

But out of that aborted attempt came a piece of game design that would become the foundation for a game he could actually make, a game about solving puzzles with assembly code.

“One of the puzzles I designed [for Golden Age] was exactly TIS-100,” says Barth. “The original story of The Second Golden Age was going to involve, as you're going around this future city in the Middle East, you can stumble into this junk shop where you find this old computer.'

(see also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIS-100&oldid=780... for a shorter summary).

grogenaut• 9 years ago

I liked HRM but TIS was annoying and difficult enough that I thought "you know I could be doing TIS-100 or I could have equal frustration figuring out the nordic bluetooth SDK and mbed.io"... I went with the real world device. Same amount of skill required, actually useful though.

frostirosti• 9 years ago

My professors at the University of Virginia made this one: The IBCM == Itty Bitty Computing Machine https://aaronbloomfield.github.io/pdr/book/ibcm-chapter.pdf

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

Oh, man. This is a VM in JS ("Google Script") with a UI in Google Sheets.

If I had more time I'd post a VM in Google Sheets formulas only.

Anyone want to take it up?

Edit: hold my beer (see my reply below)

_v7gu• 9 years ago

This popped into my mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

samfisher83• 9 years ago

People have done some absolutely crazy things with Excel as well. To some people its like an OS.

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

I have met an accountant with no knowledge in programming that wrote an entire accounting suite in an excel spreadsheet, which he would copy for each client.

grenoire• 9 years ago

I am 99% sure you cannot do that. Cross-referencing cell loops are detected and prohibited, so you cannot even make a tape reader. Also, I'm not sure if you can set cell formulas with formulas either.

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

Well, I already have parentheses parsing working, which is the biggest challenge. The rest should be really easy.

Of course I'm working on Brainfk, both because of how cool it is and how simple for a Turing Complete VM. Also, because I have a lot of practice implementing it (https://www.slideshare.net/AurSaraf/virtual-machines-and-bra...)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g3-FZBnkDuLqFYOmk457...

Stay tuned.

ucaetano• 9 years ago

Not really, circular references and iterative calculations are supported in Google Sheets, as in Excel.

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

OK, Gimme back my beer, it's done!

A Brainfk interpreter in pure Google Sheets formulas. I chose BF because of how cool and simple and powerful and turing complete it is and because I have a lot of practice implementing it (Just gave a talk at PyCon IL where I live coded one, https://www.slideshare.net/AurSaraf/virtual-machines-and-bra...).

Of course it would be at least as easy to implement any other virtual machine, you might not need the parentheses matcher which was the biggest challenge and I had to go through a few designs until it worked.

taftster• 9 years ago

"OK, Gimme back my beer, it's done!"

2 hours later. In BF none-the-less. You're my hero, you put me to shame.

amirhirsch2• 9 years ago

I created a VM in excel in my master's thesis. Table 1-4

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/45983

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

Wow, this is extremely cool.

You created a VM in Excel and a VM that runs Excel in an FPGA, proving equivalence of Excel and an FPGA :-P

throwaway2016a• 9 years ago

I didn't know about App Scripts. This is very cool not just because it is a relatively clean visualization of a CPU but also because (on a personal level) it showed me what App Scripts can do.

Now if only it displayed the register values in hex or binary. As an education aid in college I found it easier to visualize what was actually happening in one of those bases. Another useful feature for debuggers is to highlight the values that changed in the last step. Sometimes even highlighting the exact bit if displaying in binary. I'm not sure how doable that is in Google Sheets though.

Edit: it's also a nice attention to detail that the stack shares the same heap as instructions. It might have been an easy out to put the stack in it's own column.

tyingq• 9 years ago

Now if only it displayed the register values in hex or binary.

I assume that's as easy as adding a few more cells with =DEC2HEX(A2) or whatever.

XCSme• 9 years ago

So cool! Useless, but cool :)

gkya• 9 years ago

Wut? It's a really nice illustration of how a computer works. Have you clicked the link?

Mister_Snuggles2• 9 years ago

This reminds me of a "game" that a friend and I made in Excel.

The game was, roughly, a text-based adventure game. Each row in the sheet represented a "room", columns across gave names to the directions you could go and the target rooms, a description of the room, etc. I think there were other columns to mark whether the room represented the end of the game too. The UI was a bunch of buttons and cells on another tab that were manipulated by VBA code.

The game was never very good, but we ended up creating quite a lot within that limited framework.

laumars• 9 years ago

VBA is less limited than people like the believe. When I was bored in one college lesson I was playing around with calling Win32 APIs inside a Word 97 macro. I was able to call winsock and write a simple chat application.

Mister_Snuggles2• 9 years ago

VBA is actually a pretty amazing language.

Even without diving into the Win32 APIs, there is an absolutely amazing amount of stuff that gets exposed via COM and, as a result, is easily accessible from VBA.

Of course, the biggest downside to all this power is that people actually used it. This is how you end up with businesses that live and die by gigantic and virtually impenetrable Excel workbooks.

epx• 9 years ago

I remember of a Blackjack game implemented in SuperCalc 3 using only circular referencing and IF() as "programming" loopholes

exabrial• 9 years ago

From the "use the right tool for the job" department :D

chubot• 9 years ago

I can't see the code without edit access? I go to Tools -> Script Editor, click, and it does nothing. No error even. (Happens in both Firefox and Chrome.)

briansteffens2• 9 years ago

That's weird. You should be able to copy the document and then view the source in your copy.

kevin2r2• 9 years ago

Thanks, making a copy works. But it should show you an error like "You need permissions to edit this document" or something.

kevin2r2• 9 years ago

Yes, me too, I also wanted to see the implementation. I did submit a "Problem Report" on why you don't get visual feedback when opening the script editor and getting an error.

j45• 9 years ago

Fun read, it reminded me of a Computing Science assignment I remember to this day - prof had us build a Russian compiler that worked with trits (0,1,2) instead of bits. A tool like this would have made traversing and visualizing it a lot easier.

assafmo• 9 years ago

So much awesomeness!

Fej• 9 years ago

Now all we need is a higher-level language that compiles to Sheets VM. How hard would it be to write a C-like for this?

SonOfLilit11• 9 years ago

Not that hard. Allow me to recommend NAND2Tetris, one of the best courses I've ever tried, that has a great practical lesson on exactly that.

louithethrid• 9 years ago

Cloud vaping The next big step in free hosting: Milking public available turing complete services for free computation power.

ibejoeb• 9 years ago

I have a pretty big app that uses Sheets for free storage, apps script for processing and HtmlService to expose an json api endpoints and to serve the UI. I'm pretty happy with it. Totally free app.

LarryPage• 9 years ago

Haha I did the same thing to build huge scrapers.

kalleboo• 9 years ago

Or DDoSing http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/google-attack-...

IgorPartola• 9 years ago

I had this idea one time to use MySQL triggers to create a bunch of XOR gates and then use those as a basis for a CPU. Then eventually I could run Linux on that and rung MySQL on top of it.

erikatoni• 9 years ago

Awesome!!!

stared• 9 years ago

And I thought that http://www.deepexcel.net/ (Deep Spreadsheets with ExcelNet) was mind-blowing...

Making a virtual machine in Google Sheets

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