Comment by drostie
13 years ago
There's an aspect of that, too. I'm especially influenced by the circuit diagrams in G, the language which you program in when using LabVIEW. Basically most of the system, except for loops, looks like one big circuit. (Since loops are ugly because they're nonfunctional, I have wasted some time trying to think of what the Haskell version of G would look like, how you would embed monads in the circuit elements, and so forth.)
Can you point to an example of a nontrivial program in G that does something people would normally do in a spreadsheet?
The best reference I can show for the general programming model was a blog post which is not in G, but was called "Why Concatenative Programming Matters":
http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-concatenativ...
which shows you how graphical diagrams can make sense out of concatenative programs.
If you really want an example, then I will give you this with some caution:
http://team358.org/files/programming/ControlSystem2009-/LabV...
The caution is that LabVIEW views a data source as a sort of continuous input stream, so that it is manipulating individual values at any given time. I would rather view vectors as more fundamental in a spreadsheet language.