Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming

Recording of a guest lecture I gave for the Esoteric Programming Languages course at CMU.

[NFSHeld]

Somewhere in California, a programmer who sees this is shouting for his wife "Oh my god, Sarah! Quick! Come and look! Somebody discovered that image morph function I developed for PowerPoint!" and a tiny tear of joy will glisten in the corner of his eye. And she will come over, smile, and re-watch the whole video with him.

[petersmythe]

Legend has it that PowerPoint has an obscure feature which rapidly computes exact solutions to arbitrary high dimensional traveling salesmen problems no matter how adversarially designed, but it's a feature nobody uses.

[benjaminbrady]

I love how Microsoft have clearly put the best programmers in the world entirely on PowerPoint and not Windows

[alimamulmasum]

My man is ×1.25 by default
Really loved it.

[leigonlord]

what ive learnt from this is that microsoft has some incredibly intelligent people working on powerpoint. for some reason.

[FrankFortier]

10 minutes in : Why is everyone freaking in the comment, that's a pretty normal use of Powerpoint, it's not a magical program
35 minutes in : It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him
End of the video : UNLIMITED .

[baganatube]

There is either a perfectionist engineer or an insane product manager at Microsoft.

[icehawk]

Died at the "This requires more investigation" at the image recognition part

[SundaraRamanR]

15:18 "now you might wonder how we can simulate multiple bits of RAM..."
No, Tom, I wasn't wondering that at that moment, because my mind was too busy being blown away from seeing a Portal level implemented on a single PowerPoint slide.

[muin]

All the programmers who worked on making of power point will be so proud to see their work is actually being appreciated by someone

[chigozie]

I used to know how PowerPoint works, now I don't even think I know what PowerPoint is.

[viharcontractor]

Today I realized why PowerPoint has the word "Power" in its name.

[maezelbop]

"Now Mister Wildenhain, we've been reviewing your resume, and you seem to have listed 'Microsoft Office' under 'Programming Languages.'"


"Yes, that's correct."

[LofiWurld]

Feel like this was a robust military grade application acquired and repurposed by microsoft to make presentations

[jonas]

I feel like every neat but useless side project someone at microseoft develops ends up in some obscure submenu only to be completly abused by some guy on the internet

[RichardHennigan]

Fun fact: Windows 11 is just going to be one big PowerPoint presentation.

[nexterpl]

A guy with I Pi joke on a T-shirt, a hat with "MATH" written on it, teaches you how to program in PowerPoint.


Yet still, Windows 10 lags when you open up image viewer.

[chigozie]

Everyone: WHO DA HECK CREATED AN IMAGE COMPARISON ALGORITHM TO DO TRANSITIONS?

Microsoft: Well how else do transitions work??

[DeSaxofoonVanPeter]

Intricate fish models and complex fractals? And (quasi-?)artifical intelligence? In _my_ PowerPoint? Great lecture, Tom!

[Trolligarch]

Finally, someone who appreciates the power of PowerPoint. It's always awkward to explain to people that you use PowerPoint to design graphics and make videos with :p