Daniel Andres Pinto Alvarado

Daniel Andres Pinto Alvarado is a software engineering student at Universidad Simón Bolívar. His areas of research are functional programming, domain specific languages, and type-driven software development.

As an expert in Haskell with experience in Web Assembly, he leads the implementation of ZenSheet in the browser.

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Spreadsheets as a Wide-Spectrum Computing Environment

VisiCalc was released on October 17, 1979, and instantly became the killer app that ignited the personal computing revolution. 45 years later, spreadsheets are still the most popular computing tool in the world, yet practitioners don’t think of themselves as a doing "programming work." Computer science researchers, however, have long recognized spreadsheet modeling as a form of programming.

Our talk illustrates the virtues of spreadsheet computing along with some unfortunate choices made at the inception and during the evolution of that paradigm. We show how a relatively minor extension to Christopher Strachey's traditional model of computation replicates the behavior of spreadsheets and paves the way to extend their expressiveness. The result is a computing environment amenable to a wide-spectrum of users, from K-12 students to spreadsheet practitioners and software engineers.

Monte Carlo Methods in Haskell and Functional Spreadsheets (ITPC 2024)

Monte Carlo simulations are an important computing technique in science, engineering, and business. Originally employed to perform complex calculations required for the development of nuclear weapons (Manhattan Project), Monte Carlo methods have found multiple uses in fields as diverse as physics, chemistry, telecommunications, virology, marketing, and finance. They are also useful in educational settings, helping students develop statistical intuition and a better understanding of well-known results, like the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem.

We introduce the topic and demonstrate how to implement Monte Carlo simulations in a functional programming language, like Haskell, as well as a higher-order functional spreadsheet, like ZenSheet.