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’.