Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

Spreadsheets are optimized for data entry. Try entering CVS data manually using a text editor.

Without Excel there would be no way for my sales/marketing team to give me valuable data to process at the backend.

If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry.

Lotus 1-2-3 got people to use computers. One could argue that spreadsheets are the single biggest business innovation of the late 20th century. I don't think they're going away that easily.

I know people who type whole letters in Excel. I know an accountant in particular who I showed how to use MS Word for writing letters, but he prefers Excel. He writes full documents in Excel, prints them out and mails them.

Laugh if you want but spreadsheets are not going away in my lifetime.

OT and just my opinion: it seems to exists an unfortunate trend in the promotion of new ideas where, instead of simply exposing the virtues of the idea on its own, it first needs to knock down the (proven and world adopted) predecessor as something unpolished, unplanned, untested and, in general, a bad idea from the start.

Compare this trend, for instance, with the first Linux announcement by Linus Torvalds [1] below.

It is an unfortunate trend because it ends up polarizing and creating unnecessary division among the early adopters of the new idea and the current userbase of the old one.

From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

Newsgroups: comp.os.minix

Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?

Summary: small poll for my new operating system

Message-ID:

Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT

Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix –

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

[1] http://www.thelinuxdaily.com/2010/04/the-first-linux-announc...

Iteration on spreadsheets is great, and there's opportunity for tons of innovation in this space. But this suffers from the same problems that most spreadsheets have. Errors like not averaging over the right set of data (which you pointed out) don't come up because the code can't be diffed in git. They come up because there's not enough clarity in whether a set of cells are consistent or not. Making this text-based doesn't add clarity because ultimately there will be too much text to read.

Here's a test for the most common kind of error. If I add data in A5 and B5, will that data be represented in the chart? How about in the averages? Will I be able to even see that?

Here's the pivot: Break your data into regions, where regions have repeated elements. Something like this:

    A1 = 'Height
    B1 = 'Width
    C1 = 'Area
    A2:C2 = Region {
      C1 = =A1*B1
    }{
      A1 = 2
      B1 = 3
      A2 = 4
      B2 = 5
    }
    B3 = 'Average
    C3 = =sum(C2)/count(C2)

This could be used to generate:

    Height  Width   Area
    2       3        6
    4       5       20
            Average 13

The dataset associated with that sub-block can be clearly annotated to an editing user as such, with simple tools for adding a row to that dataset, or sorting it without effecting the rest of the sheet. Within the dataset, there's no corruption of the formulas (the third row's C cant be different than the second's), you've still got your diffing (probably better because it's clear that data changed but formulas different) and it's extremely hard to make the calculated average come out wrong.

Yeah, that exact representation isn't great. Maybe a "view" metaphor, so that headers and footers can be attached to the dataset instead of floating outside it. But once you've gone this direction, there's all sorts of amazing things possible by sharing datasets, linking them, transforming them, etc.

This.

I've been at top 20 banks in the world that run 14 hour jobs in Excel that import data from web services, run analysis, and FTP result sets elsewhere. They were used to analyze risk on tens of billions of dollars worth of securities.

They were riddled with bugs, but it let the front-line traders iterate quickly and prototype something that the backend team (my team) could turn into a "real" reporting process.