Comment by ramchip
16 years ago
You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent
Saying "Lisp had it X years ago" sounds perhaps a little weenish, but... that sounds a lot like the Cells library, and the even older Garnet KR. Granted, they're quite a lot less accessible than spreadsheet programs.
FRP seems to be modern take on it. It's being very actively researched in the Haskell community.
Visicalc: 1979. Excel: 1985. Garnet: early 1990s. Cells: 2000 or so.
On the other hand ... Sketchpad: 1963. (Constraint satisfaction, but not embedded in a general-purpose programming system.) Prolog: 1972. And Guy L Steele wrote a nice general-purpose constraint system in 1978. ("Constraints", MIT AI Memo 502.)