Since that title is baity, we changed it to something more neutral in accordance with the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anybody suggests a better title, we can change it again.
Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
51–60 of 101 posts
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#52Do you think named cells and ranges in Excel / Google Sheets gets at this problem?
Yes, I think that they certainly help at making spreadsheets more readable. At present Stencila sheets only has named cells but one of the things we want to add soon is mapping of cells onto underlying `data.frames` or matrices. In other words to "project" data objects onto the spreadsheet grid.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#53Has anyone here ever used Lotus Improv? Does this program solve some of the flaws that this article highlights? I keep on hearing how Improv was one of the great programs that never took off, and I'm curious to now try it.
For those of you that don't know (or weren't even born yet), Lotus Improv was a spreadsheet alternative that was released for the NeXT computer in the early '90s that was well-reviewed but never sold well. It was eventually abandoned when IBM bought lotus in the mid-90's.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#54I 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 hei…
Spreadsheet software is improving here and there. Excel today is not your old lotus-1-2-3. Although you'd be hard pressed to notice.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#55This looks very similar to AlphaSheets and the thing I was making over spring break until my friends called it stupid. Very interesting!
> the thing I was making over spring break until my friends called it stupid.
Those sound less like friends, and more like people holding you back from curiosity and creativity, which can bring many direct and indirect fruits.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#56Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#57Lotus 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…
Sooner or later, all project management ends up in Excel. Doesn't matter what ticket or tracking tool you've paid for.
This is by no means observed in my experiences. It's certainly understandable how it could get there and what excel could do, but if that was a trend, its one thats faded.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#58Lotus 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…
At least Excel documents are somewhat portable.
I knew a guy who did everything in MS Works spreadsheet. In 1998 those files were pretty much locked to that software.
It's useful experience though, watching someone use a screw-driver to hammer in a nail. For him it worked - he didn't have to faff around with tab stops or margins. He just clicked a different cell.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#59Iteration 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.
Hey, Stencila developer here. Yes, I agree. I recently came across the Numbers app when I was writing this. I haven't used it but from what I have read it seems to have some really good ideas for improving the spreadsheet interface.
Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment
#60very well done! a plaintext spreadsheet. I think it has a lot of appeal, and for all the reasons outlined. Looking at it raw, is fairly understandable. Awesome! Coolest thing i've seen all month on HN.