ABSTRACT
You may have already come across my fable of Spreadsheet City, in which a small ›nancial institution in the rural Midwest of the United States of America employs an intern by the name of Derek to develop and maintain a risk management system. Derek, fresh out of college and recalling a similar project he completed for his course on quantitative modeling, chooses to develop the system in a spreadsheet package, with additional functionality created through the spreadsheet’s macro language. Initially a 1-day a week task, the system soon grows to such an extent that it becomes the primary focus of a team of highly paid programmers (who are brought in, at great expense, from the “Big City” several hundred miles away). The programmers enhance the macro language by coding pricing and numerical functionality in the programming language known as C++.1 As time goes by, the head of human resources marvels at the contented team spirit of the programmers. Indeed, she notices that, despite being from the Big City and therefore somewhat adverse to the ways of country folk, they appear to be happier with each passing day.2 She decides to retrain as a programmer and eventually joins the team.
