Simon Peyton Jones

You can write anything, like because Lambda is computationally complete, you can write any computation in Excel.

Now, it would be a bit slow, but you can.

And much more practically, you can take formulae that previously you just copy pasted here and there, and you wanted to make reusable, wrap them up in a Lambda, and now you can just call the Lambda.

And now it is a proper grown up functional language that is Turing complete.

Just search for Lambda Excel.

Those two keywords will get you lots of raw material.

All of these people who you see very successful, wandering around, looking as if they've made it, I guess you might class me among them now.

They are, all of them, just making it up as they go along.

They feel insecure, uncertain, not sure what to do next, not sure what their next steps are, not sure what next big problem they're going to tackle, unsure about whether what they're doing is going to be successful or not.

And so all of their confidence is, I mean, they project confidence maybe, that's partly a life skill, but often they're not.

And so the fact that, you know, in those days, of course, I felt very not confident, I would say, you know,

Since all of these successful people are making it up as they go along, it's fine for you to be as well.

And they've been lucky, moreover.

They've been lucky.

But if you want to be lucky, you do need to put yourself in a position where accidents can happen to you.

And that means taking risks.

So if you want to be lucky, you need to put yourself in positions where lucky things could happen.

And that means taking some kind of risk.

So if you're very conservative and never take any risk, then it's very unlikely that the accident that is life-transforming will happen.

That's a balance, of course.