I am personally a fan of Calca, not only does it do live coding, it can also do some powerful math:
Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
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Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#32Iteration 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 d…
The Numbers app on OSX does something quite like this. It's highly underrated, but having a number of smaller, floating spread sheets in one big sandbox is waaaaay better for many things than a single sheet. I think the concept should be pushed even further.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#33It seems, perhaps, Resolver One's time has finally come. Alas, Resolver One (and Resolver Systems) died a slow death and ceased to be in 2012. Perhaps this will fare better.
I always thought Resolver was a brilliant idea, but they never gained any traction against the heavy weights (Excel).
Edit- Add link to Resolver One wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolver_One
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#34I think the more usual form of that phrase is "Spreadsheets are dead, long live spreadsheets!". And that captures the truth of the situation better. Despite all the known weaknesses of spreadsheets, it is sheer hubris to believe that they will be supplanted by reactive programming (or databases, or anything else for that matter). It seems that users will give up their spreadsheets only when they are pried from their…
Sorry, I can't resist indulging in a moment of pedantry here.
The phrase "The king is dead, long live the king!", which this title and many others play off of, is referring to two separate individuals, the now-dead king in the first clause and his successor in the second. The phrase is representative of a theory of monarchy in which, upon the death of the sovereign, their authority passes instantaneously to their heir, without the need for a coronation or a formal investiture, in order to foreclose on the possibility of pretenders to the throne arising during an interregnum.
So the correct (and I know you said 'usual and not 'correct', but bear with me) form of the phrase would be 'spreadsheets are dead, long live [whatever is succeeding spreadsheets]'. Of course, historically speaking, it was not at all uncommon for dead royals to suddenly reappear and reassert their claim to the throne....
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#35This looks very sexy, and I don't say that often about technology. This is something I've wanted to see for a long time - the ability to seamlessly move from a spreadsheet to an application
Edit: Quick feedback
Cell names appear to be case sensitive. While this makes sense from a programming standpoint, if I can't have a cell named "a1" the application should convert that to "A1" for me.
Not being able to tab between cells is annoying. Was there a decision made not to capture the tab event?
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#36I think another change is needed for spreadsheets to be a more reliable tool.
Right now a sheet is a full document thing. Meaning that it starts with A1 in top left, and spreads out from there.
but what if you could break a "sheet" down into units?
So that you can have say a constants unit, with its own A1 to whatever as needed, and then another unit, perhaps called results, that hold the formula in their own A1 to whatever, each unit movable and extendable on the screen at the same time.
Now if formula A1 wants to refer to something in constants A1, the entry would look something like constants(A1).
This way one would have everything on screen, while avoiding the worry that as the sheet grows and one move things around to make it more readable, the formulas are referencing the wrong cells.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#37I am personally a fan of Calca, not only does it do live coding, it can also do some powerful math: http://calca.io/
I agree, and variable names (with spaces!) are much more descriptive than cell ids. I do wish for an open source version through.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#38I think another change is needed for spreadsheets to be a more reliable tool. Right now a sheet is a full document thing. Meaning that it starts with A1 in top left, and spreads out from there. but what if you could break a "sheet" down into units? So that you can have say a constants unit, with its own A1 to whatever as needed, and then another unit, perhaps called results, that hold the formula in their own A1 to w…
That's what different worksheets are for.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#39Misspelling Dan Bricklin's name within the first four words gives me low expectations…
Hey, thanks for pointing that out. Fixed now. I actually got it wrong in all three places I mentioned him :(
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#40I've been shifting a bunch of data analysis out of spreadsheets (and some adhoc SQL) to Jupyter/Pandas, and we've found some unexpected tradeoffs on both sides. The lack of testability and version control (and really, long-term maintainability) is what drove us out of spreadsheets into Jupyter. We've found though that the workflow in Jupyter, even with Pandas, is not great for exploring and getting a feel for data --…
Shout out to Rodeo IDE as well -- they're doing a great job at making an "Rstudio for Python"