The Microsoft researcher was, by his own admission, already going through something of a midlife crisis. But it was the woman sitting next to him on a flight who, with her spreadsheet, changed the course of his career. His new path would put him at the centre of an effort to bring the power of computer code to those who are unable to write it themselves, which is to say the vast majority of us.

这位微软(Microsoft)研究员自己承认，当时他已经在经历某种中年危机。但正是飞机上坐在他旁边的那位女士用她的电子表格改变了他的职业生涯。新的职业道路将让他处于一项努力的核心，目的是帮助那些无法自己编程的人——也就是我们绝大多数人——获得计算机代码的力量。

I met Sumit Gulwani in Vienna this month at the annual workshop for Software Engineering Methods in Spreadsheets, where he was the keynote speaker. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. It was this, along with his role at Microsoft, that so impressed his fellow passenger when he was returning from a seminar five years ago. With such credentials¹, surely he could help her with the text manipulations she was struggling with in an Excel spreadsheet?

我在本月召开的“电子表格软件工程方法”维也纳年度研讨会上遇到了素密•古尔瓦尼(Sumit Gulwani)，他是基调演讲人。他拥有美国加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)计算机科学的博士学位。正是这一学位，加上他在微软的职位，在5年前出席一个研讨会后的返程中打动了与邻座的乘客。凭借这样的资历，他当然能帮助她解决她搞不定的Excel电子表格中的文本操作，不是吗？

“At that time, I had to excuse myself out of the situation,” he tells me when we sit down in a courtyard to talk after his speech. “I’d never used Excel before in my life.”

古尔瓦尼演讲完之后，我们在一个院子里坐下来交谈。他告诉我：“当时我不得不抱歉地说自己处理不了。我此前从未用过Excel。”

Although Gulwani couldn’t help, he was intrigued² enough to change jobs. He went from helping⁴ programmers at Microsoft to helping non-programmers, enabling users to perform simple, repetitive tasks more easily. Flash Fill, one of the tools that Gulwani’s team developed, was released in Excel 2013. To get an idea of what it does, imagine organising an event. You have a list of the guests’ email addresses but, in order to make a check-in sheet for the event, what you want is a list of their names in the format⁵ “last name, first name”. Although Excel functions can do this, some users will not know how.

尽管没有帮上忙，但古尔瓦尼觉得好奇，于是改了行。他从帮助微软的程序员改行为帮助非程序员，让用户更容易执行重复性的简单任务。Flash Fill是古尔瓦尼团队开发的工具之一，它包括在Excel 2013版本中。要了解它的用途，想象一下组织一场活动。你有客人的电子邮件地址名单，但为了制作一份签到表格，你想要一份“姓在前名在后”格式的名单。尽管Excel的功能能做到这一点，但一些用户不知道怎么做。

With Flash Fill, you type in an example or two of what you want as “output” from the email inputs⁶, and the tool will fill in the rest. For instance, once you have written “Clinton, Hillary” in the column after hillary.clinton@secretserver.com, Flash Fill will automatically produce “Trump⁷, Donald” from donald.trump@usausa.com — all without having to enter a single formula. This is called “programming by example”.

有了Flash Fill，你可以自己打出一两个样例，说明你从电邮地址“输入”希望得到什么“输出”，这个工具就会填充整个名单。例如，一旦你在hillary.clinton@secretserver.com后的那一栏写入“克林顿，希拉里”，Flash Fill就会自动从donald.trump@usausa.com后的那一栏生成“特朗普，唐纳德”——这些都不用输入任何公式就能完成。这被称为“样例编程”(programming by example)。

Developments such as these will, according to Gulwani, “keep control of the digital divide”, preventing the existing split between those who can programme and those who cannot from growing even wider.

古尔瓦尼表示，这些工具的开发将会“控制数字鸿沟”，阻止那些可以编程和那些无法编程者之间的现有差距越来越大。

But I fear that, while a tool such as Flash Fill is empowering, it is also in its present form something of a “black box” — meaning it is unclear how it calculates outputs from given inputs. As such, it does not (yet) encourage a user to go a step further and learn how to adapt the code Flash Fill uses in order to perform different tasks.

但我担心，尽管Flash Fill等工具功能强大，但就目前形式而言也是某种“黑匣子”，也就是说不清楚它如何从给定输入计算出结果。这样的话，它（仍）没有鼓励用户更进一步，学会如何改写Flash Fill的代码来执行不同的任务。

Another speaker at the Sems conference had a radical⁸ idea about a different way in which spreadsheets could narrow the digital divide: take the elements that are most attractive about the application and use those to encourage non-programmers to code.

维也纳研讨会的另一位演讲者对电子表格缩小数字鸿沟的不同方式有着激进的看法：提炼出这款应用中最吸引人的元素，用它们鼓励非程序员编码。

Professor Felienne Hermans, head of the Spreadsheet Lab at Delft University of Technology, notes that the “liveness” and “directness” of spreadsheets makes them attractive to use. With spreadsheets, the results are instantly visible, or “live”, as you change numbers or formulas. You also see “directly” the entirety of the field of play — formulas, data, output — as you work. By contrast, when developing a website, there is distance between what is visible on the site and where you can edit the code that produces it.

荷兰代尔夫特理工大学(Delft University of Technology)的电子表格实验室主管、教授费列利安娜•埃尔曼(Felienne Hermans)指出，电子表格的“活跃感”和“直接性”使它们对用户具有吸引力。用电子表格，只要你改变公式或数据，结果立即可见，也就是“活跃”的。你也能在工作时“直接”看到整个场景——公式、数据和输出。相比之下，在开发网站时，网站显示内容和你编写代码的地方不在一个界面。

Hermans has co-authored a paper that proposes the development of an interface⁹ where a user can directly write code while a spreadsheet, in the same field of view, updates live. Encouragingly, Microsoft has hired Hermans for the summer, though the company won’t say anything about her work for them.

埃尔曼与他人合著了一篇论文，提议开发用户可以直接编码的界面，同一场景中的电子表格即时更新。令人鼓舞的是，微软今年夏季雇佣了埃尔曼，尽管该公司不会透露她的具体工作。

Another thing the company keeps quiet about are estimates of the number of spreadsheet users around the world. But there is a mention of “more than 750m Excel users” in an article by the company’s UK enterprise team.

该公司保持沉默的另一件事是对全世界电子表格用户数量的估计。但该公司的英国企业团队在一篇文章中提到“逾7.5亿Excel用户”。

That is a lot of people to empower. And, while a helpful black box may grab and intrigue³ them, it is the development of a better, friendlier way to code in spreadsheets that I look forward to the most.

这意味着有很多人有待获得编码的力量。尽管一个有用的黑匣子可能引起他们的注意，并激发他们的兴趣，但我最期望的是在电子表格中发展出更容易、更友好的编码方式。