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What will become of Mark Zuckerburg's empire of shit?
I was recently thinking wistfully of the brief golden age of Facebook, and how it made me more connected to my social network. At one point, most of my friends and family posted updates about their lives. I knew all about my friends from high school and college. I even connected to members of my extended family. And I could easily ask questions to my network and receive answers. It was great.
That was a long time ago. Zuckerberg pissed it all away. At first, he tried to replace the news media. Later, when that failed, he went all in on maximizing ad revenue. Facebook is now a wasteland of ads, AI, and clueless boomers. Nearly 100% of its value proposition is gone. No one I care about posts there any more.
Zuckerburg did a few things right, all more than a decade ago:
He figured out that people will give you all their personal info for free and that this is worth a lot to advertisers. In his words, "they trust me, dumb fucks".
He made sure his voting shares didn't get diluted so he has, in theory, monarchal control of Facebook
He bought Instagram for cheap in 2012
He has reaped the rewards of these decisions handsomely and currently is the world's 4th richest person with a net worth north of $200 billion.
But what has he done more recently?
Bought WhatsApp for $19 billion and promised to never advertise on the platform. Even though he has broken the promise, it's unclear how they will ever recoup this
Blown tens of billions on the "Metaverse", a project which no one wants and has negative traction
Made "Stories", "Reels", and "Threads" – blatant knockoffs of existing products which failed to win in the marketplace
Made an open source LLM called LLAMA which was initially a success but has been blown out of the water by a Chinese startup that trained a superior model for just $6 million
I recently read the book "Titan", about John D. Rockefeller. Despite being history's greatest philanthropist, Rockefeller viewed Standard Oil as his real contribution to humanity. People take the wrong lesson from his life, which is generally viewed as "he did a bunch of evil shit to get rich but he gave it all away, so it's okay."
Bill Gates folllowed that model. Maybe Zuckerberg thinks the same way. But it's unlikely that anything he can do with his billions can undo the damage his social networks have done, and continue to do to the social fabric. The irony is that if he had just focused on making Facebook the best version of itself, he would probably be even richer today, and beloved for making the iconic product of the age.
But instead we have Instagram, Reels, and a bunch of other shit that just makes people miserable. Will it stand the test of time? I doubt it.
As some of you might know, Gates made his fortune leading a company called "Microsoft" in the 80s and 90s.
It is somewhat of an understatement to say that the Microsoft of that era was not generally seen as a force for good. They were the most hated company on the net in that era. Their software (i.e. Windows 95, 98, ME) was garbage. Its security was atrocious. Their marketplace behavior was anti-competitive. Their 'innovations' were things like a fucking talking paperclip which would try to distract you in word.
Basically, I stopped hating them when I stopped using their crap for serious work. Recent iterations of windows are tolerable as an operating system for a gaming-only machine, though.
I think that Gates has reached net good with his philanthropy, but to claim that MS was his real contribution to humanity is absurd.
Edit: made misinterpreted quotation more accurate.
Initiated nerds were shitting on MS in those days, sure, but I think that leads people to underrate how successful they were at putting computers into the hands of non-techies.
There's a similar effect with Apple, which is often lambasted for making kiddie walled-garden software for people who don't know how to use computers (as Wes Borg said even back in the iMac days it's a "computer for idio... for mommies and daddies") but it's undeniable how successful the iPhone design as "computers for the rest of us" has been, it's so successful that people have forgotten how to use computers that aren't smartphones.
But back to MS, the simple fact that they made Excel is a towering achievement of ergonomics. Excel is rarely called this but it's probably the most popular programming language ever made, one so simple and intuitive you can get 90s businessmen to understand it.
So yeah, as with everything if you scratch the surface it looks like the pile of shit everything is. But people underrate how valuable and impressive it is to stack shit that high. I think Zucc will be fine.
In a very technical sense, you could indeed argue that Excel can be viewed as programming language. It seems to be Turing-complete: I can describe the rules defining state transitions in the first cell, use the rest of the row to store the state of the band and then tell it to fill out subsequent rows, running the TM row by row. It would be up to the user to stop adding more rows once it has reached a halting state, though. Of course, the memory overhead would scale with the number of total steps.
While I am sure that there are power users (or nerds who like a new challenge after brainfuck) who implement prime factorization, array sorting or iterative solvers in Excel, my estimate is that most users only create programs which take input which can be reasonably be considered one- or two-dimensional and runs for a time which is proportional to the input size. Like, they can calculate the sum, average or minimum of a column. Ask them for anything which is above linear runtime, like the median or matrix multiplication (without resorting to purpose-built functions), which even a novice programmer who has the concept of cascading for-loops can solve, and they will be stuck. (Of course, there is always VBA, but if VBA makes Excel a programming language, then it also makes Word a programming language.)
Despite this, spreadsheets have their uses (if you can stomach interleaving the code and the data). For example, I used one to catalogue my discoveries when playing Book of Hours without spoilers.
TL;DR: calling Excel "the most popular programming language ever made" is like saying that pictograms are "the most widely read script on the planet". Sure, only a 1.5 billion people can read the word "airplane", while likely more than half of the world population would recognize the ✈ symbol. However, these universal pictograms do not qualify as a script because they are not expressive enough. Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.
Edit: also, to the degree that spreadsheets empower users, letting Microsoft take credit for that seems a bit like giving Toyota the credit for providing mobility to millions of Americans. The empowering thing is the underlying invention, the fact that the customer selected Excel and Toyota instead of SuperCalc and Fiat is of much less concern.
Well, not necessarily. You're missing:
The best programming language is ultimately the one you know how to use right now, and "office worker gets bored, automates themselves" is [or once was] a valid career path. Sure, Excel stops being a viable option once you need to do things like talk to a network (which, totally coincidentally, Microsoft has an intermediate-level programming language called Access that can use Excel sheets as a frontend), and once you outgrow Access you're really in trouble (mainly because now you've created a problem for programmers to solve, and so now you're going to have to pay for the bootstrapping that Excel/Access did for you)... but most people don't get that far anyway.
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Both of these are trivial to implement in Excel if you know what they are (without using the builtin functions, which seems... kind of dumb? like, do you implement lists from bare metal in python?) -- which granted most business users do not, but that doesn't make excel worse than a real language at these things.
If you think of it as a functional language in which you can see the value of every variable all the time, it becomes more language-esque -- you can do quite a lot without resorting to vba, you just do it in different ways than iterating over arrays or cascading for loops.
Excel can be very dangerous for business logic because it doesn’t have strict error handling. I’ve seen an insurance company severely misprice an obscure product because somebody accidentally deleted a cell in one row on a different sheet and nobody noticed.
Bugs can happen in python too, of course, but it’s at least a little more robust.
I said that it's an interesting programming language, not a good one -- believe me I have seen some shit too.
But to be fair, not that many programming languages to have strict data validity checking built in/mandatory out of the box -- you can implement that in Excel too, it's not even that hard -- just a little conditional formatting on key cells can go a long way, and if you really wanted to you could probably get pretty advanced.
But Excel users tend not to be that interested in this sort of thing, because most of them are also bad programmers.
I'm sure you're right, and certainly python doesn't. Type hints aren't binding, etc etc.
If you'll forgive me for changing my tune partway in, what I meant to convey is that I don't like the way that excel splays the entire workspace out in front of you, allowing you to change the value of any variable at any time, anywhere through the history of the 'code' because it's not imperative in the same way that code is. That allows way more scope for weird, hard-to-find bugs. (Yes, you can lock cells but often people don't, or they lock the wrong ones, or they unlock something to edit it and forget to re-lock).
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The only criticism I'm seeing here is that it's not the form of programming you're used to and that it's optimized for light scripting because that's what most people do. Those sorting tasks you're thinking about and manipulating arbitrarily sized data? That's part of the standard library. It even has lambdas now and the formula language is itself a PL in its own right.
It's fit for purpose as the lightest of scripting languages. You wouldn't argue Python isn't a PL because most people use it for light scripting.
Entire companies run on excel macros, and it has ports of Doom and XCOM in it. Go watch competitive excel competitions (yes that's a thing) and then try and argue it's not a PL.
I understand what you're doing. You're trying to argue that people who play candy crush aren't gamers. And sure, most people that use excel aren't programmers. It's still the most used PL on the world.
Well, I think 90% of the people who write python and can do matrix multiplication can implement arbitrary-sized matrix multiplication in python. (And if I posed a similar problem, like "combine two matrices like in matrix multiplication, but instead of summing the products, just take the maximum", they would likewise come up with a solution, not simply say "that is not in numpy, hence it can't be done".)
By contrast, I would estimate that the fraction of people who grok MM and use excel which could implement the modified problem is less than 20%.
Of course, this is mostly an argument about semantics. I would not call someone who sets an alarm clock on their mobile a programmer, even though they are changing the behavior of a computer system to suit their needs. I don't use spreadsheets, but I occasionally use the unix sed command, which is technically Turing complete. However, like 98% of sed users, what I do with it is not something I would call programming -- I use it for trivial string/RE operations, but do not know how to implement a while loop in it (and also consider it ill fit for anything which requires a while loop). So sed is technically a PL, but most sed users are not sed programmers. Likewise postscript: technically Turing-complete, but the subset of users who use it to express arbitrary computation as opposed to just having it draw glyphs and graphics primitives is almost a null set. Likewise, HTML+CSS+User clicking.
Now, you are correct that Excel has had recursable lambda expressions since 2020, which together with lazy evaluation allows arbitrary computations in a single cell. However, it is my understanding that Excel was popular in the corporate setting even before that, and I would wholeheartedly recommend VBA (*) over writing a recursive lambda function in a spreadsheet cell (with very few (tiny) exceptions).
I will concede though that this is arguing over a definition. If one defines programming rather loosely, then most programs might be invocation of a Photoshop filter. Demand a bit more expressiveness, and Excel is the top PL. Demand still more (like "most users have created a non-halting program either on purpose or by accident at least once"), and Python might be most popular. Put in a bunch of conditions by machine code fetishists ("it only counts if it is compiled to opcodes and run on a physical CPU"), and likely C wins. M-x butterflies and all that.
(*) Now that are five words I had not thought I would utter in that order.
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Only a very specific group of nerds was shitting on Microsoft (and still is to this day, in my experience). Most nerds, even most computer nerds, didn't really care about Microsoft. Plenty of computer nerds liked Microsoft. I don't think that @quiet_NaN's picture of Microsoft as this universally hated company is accurate. It certainly doesn't match my experience, at any rate.
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That's like saying "look how good the Mafia is at running Italian restaurants". Or like robbing a bank, donating some of the money to charity, and then trying to take credit for donating to charity.
The main reason why it was Microsoft specifically getting computers in people's hands is that Microsoft cornered the market, so nobody else could get a foothold. Microsoft should get no credit for pushing its competitors out of the market and then doing some of the good things that would have been done by the competitors that it pushed out.
Apple, Commodore, IBM, and RadioShack tried very hard to corner the market in the 1980s. It's their own fault that an upstart competitor was able to take it away from them, despite their first-mover advantage, because they did such a crappy job of actually taking care of their consumers.
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This is overstated. Apple existed as a viable competitor during the entire period, and while Microsoft used what amounted to strong-arm commercial tactics to get its OS onto every PC sold, it was indeed this OS that enabled those sales. Microsoft should get credit for providing workable baseline software, that was very open to developers, and didn't cost much money. Did they push OS/2 out of the market? Maybe. It's also possible OS/2 wasn't a viable competitor to begin with. Sometimes companies dominate because they get first mover advantage and manage to build a large moat. Sometimes companies are dominant mostly just because they have an overall superior value proposition. Microsoft, for long periods, had both.
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