Steve Bolman, “Organism in Excel” or “Faking VBA to mock Functions as first clas


Details
“Organism” is a dimensional analysis algorithm that over the past 20 years I have written in several languages (both FP and OOP paradigms). I decided 18 months ago to attempt to build it using VBA (inside Excel) and was surprised that in fact the hurdles presented by a language that remains fundamentally unchanged since the mid-90s could be overcome. To those not familiar with how Excel and VBA work together, there were reasons I thought it was likely I would not get the results I had hoped for, but with few exceptions I found workarounds.
This will not be a structured talk so I am happy to either discuss VBA in detail or focus on the product ‘Organism’, what it does and why I feel it is important as an tool for global engineering.
Bio: Steve initially presented “Organism” written in Erlang to HFPUG over 10 years ago. A Chemical Engineer by training with 3 decades of experience in capital equipment projects, his understanding of the application of Dimensional Analysis as a tool in augmenting human and machine understanding of the physical reality around us has informed and been manifest in various iterations of ‘Organism, an Engineering Ecosystem’.

Steve Bolman, “Organism in Excel” or “Faking VBA to mock Functions as first clas