> Since the formulas did depend on each other the order of (re)calculation made a difference. The first idea was to follow the dependency chains but this would have involved keeping pointers and that would take up memory. We realized that normal spreadsheets were simple and could be calculated in either row or column order and errors would usually become obvious right away. Later spreadsheets touted "natural order" as a major feature but for the Apple ][ I think we made the right tradeoff.

It would seem that the creators of VisiCalc regarded this is a choice that made sense in the context of the limitations of the Apple ][, but agree that a dependency graph would have been better.

https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/apple2/implementingvi...

Edit: It's also interesting that the tradeoff here is put in terms of correctness, not performance as in the posted article. And that makes sense: Consider a spreadsheet with =B2 in A1 and =B1 in B2. Now change the value of B1. If you recalc the sheet in row-column OR column-row order, B2 will update to match B1, but A1 will now be incorrect! You need to evaluate twice to fully resolve the dependency graph.