Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment • Hacker News Board

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#71

Post by nokome » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 9:59 PM UTC

_7fvc wrote: post #68

I think notebook environments like iPython provide greater flexibility in terms of programming. I don't think they can replace spreadsheet nor spreadsheet would develop functionality to replace notebook environments. The missing link is a seamless experience between spreadsheet and reproducible data analysis (programming). My team is working on https://nxsheet.com . We look to provide this seamless experience. For ex…

Hey, Stencila developer here. Thanks, nxsheet looks really nice - great work too!

I agree, somehow getting spreadsheets into the workflow of reproducible data analysis is important. They are a tool that I for one had ignored (focussing instead of reproducibility of text + code) - but there are too many people that use them to ignore them!

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#72

Post by nokome » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:27 PM UTC

sevensor wrote: post #14

luso_brazilian wrote: post #6

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…

The article itself is much more positive on spreadsheets than the headline -- it suggests improvements to the underlying data / computational model while preserving the interface. And it's about time somebody said something nice about spreadsheets. Go to your average (non-software) engineer and ask to see an engineering model. Chances are, it's in Excel. It's less buggy than you expect, because your average engineer…

Thanks for the comments. Actually, I was just working on importing Excel spreadsheets into Stencila sheets last night. Some interesting aspects involved in translating Excel formulas into R expressions e.g. `AVERAGE(A1:A5)` to `mean(A1:A5)`. To do it properly looks like we'll need to build an Excel formula parser. But do-able - and could be fun!

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#73

Post by nokome » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:34 PM UTC

luso_brazilian wrote: post #6

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…

Thanks for the comment. Yes, the title of the article does sound negative (I was just trying to for something that caught the eye - something that is perhaps harder to do these days than back in 1991 when Linux was released). But the body of article is supportive of the spreadsheet approach and looks to ways that we can improve it and reach out to the existing user base - not to knock it down.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#74

Post by david927 » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

shaftway wrote: post #8

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 d…

Kayia (kayia.org) is a spreadsheet/reactive programming environment but where the code can be 'diff'ed. All values in the spreadsheet are versioned, so you can either look at the current value of, say, Cell B2 or its immutable value at a specific point in time, or see how its value has changed over time. And since the code is stored in the same way as the data, version control of the source is a first-class part of the language.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#75

Post by ebiester » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:51 PM UTC

greggman wrote: post #62

ebiester wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how many people have done this. The average office worker doesn't have a development environment on their computer, but they have Excel, and they have a coworker who was a whiz who said, "Did you know you could do this?" They just kept automating task after task, silently, without the IT department ever knowing. 90% of them never thought of it as coding, and 10% realized they could make more mo…

Last time I used excel it was a Dev environment. Some menu option opened up Visual Basic for Applications with a full IDE. Is it no longer like that ?

By development environment, I mean something like ruby or java and the toolchain around that.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#76

Post by discreteevent » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

conceit wrote: post #54

blackbagboys wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. After all the phrase is not: "The king is dead. Long live the republic"

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#77

Post by nokome » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #35

This 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…

@debacle, thanks for the nice feedback.

Regarding cell names. Currently every cell has an "id" e.g. A1 which is represented in the background R session as the variable A1. If you enter a formula like "pi = 3.14" into cell A1 then that cell has an id of A1 as well as a "name" (like an alias) of "pi". You can name a cell "a1" e.g. enter "a1 = 42" into cell A1 - but that could be confusing.

Yes, not being able to tab between cells is annoying - no decision was made on that - we just haven't got round to it. Just created an issue: https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/162. Thanks for the prod!

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#78

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #17

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #4

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…

I've met graphic designers and Engineers who use Excel as a weird Illustrator/Paint and/or Visio canvas.

And then there's this guy: Old Japanese Man Creates Amazing Art Using Excel http://kotaku.com/old-japanese-man-creates-amazing-art-using...

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#79

Post by nokome » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

shaftway wrote: post #10

ebiester wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how many people have done this. The average office worker doesn't have a development environment on their computer, but they have Excel, and they have a coworker who was a whiz who said, "Did you know you could do this?" They just kept automating task after task, silently, without the IT department ever knowing. 90% of them never thought of it as coding, and 10% realized they could make more mo…

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.

Absolutely. I think it is the rapid prototyping aspect of spreadsheets that is perhaps the most powerful. For analysing large amounts of data they are obviously not great. But they excel (pardon the pun) at providing an environment in which to quickly formulate and visualise numerical models - because they are reactive so you can see what happens when you change inputs - without having to recompile, or manually rerun code.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#80

Post by Someone » Thu, Mar 24, 2016, 11:05 PM UTC

chillingeffect wrote: post #32

shaftway wrote: post #8

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 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.

The UI is clunkier than that of Numbers, but you can do something similar in Excel with tables (blocks in a sheet that you somewhat enforce some structure on. See https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Overview-of-Excel-t...).

And of course, Excel can flag cells that, according to its heuristics, seem to use inconsistent formulas, such as using empty cells in a summation, or having one cell in a column use a different formula.