Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python

This sounds like a really good idea - combining spreadsheet convenience with being able to do programmatic manipulations with python can be really value for people who are using spreadsheets to do modeling (e.g financial). I think (especially based on some other comments) a big challenge will be just getting people out of their current bubble. If you do financial modeling, you might be entrenched in excel, and if you so data science in python, you might never dream of using spreadsheets.

My unsolicited advice (that's probably on your radar anyway) would be to try and get a management consulting firm on board with this. The flexibility this has would be well used there, and you've got lots of people who are engineers stuck using spreadsheets that would be on board with trying something like this.

(co-founder of Neptyne here)

With Google Sheets you get a flavor of JS called Apps Script, a flavor of JS with some limitations. Some ways in which our use of Python differ are:

- run Python directly in the spreadsheet cells, not just as an "extension"

- a full runtime in a Jupyter kernel, so you can import and use effectively any Python package, as long as it runs on Linux

- an interactive REPL that gives you a nice test environment, but also a command line of sorts for working with your spreadsheet. (e.g. you can say `A1 = requests.get(URL).json()`) to do a one-off fetch of some data from an API.

Generally speaking we hope to give you a much more powerful/seamless integration between spreadsheet/Python than what you get with Sheets/JS

The concept of Python-based spreadsheets was explored by Resolver One[1], a defunct proprietary desktop app that was discontinued ~10 years ago[2].

It seems a web version of the app has been published in open-source[3] but that too has been EOL.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120211201410/http://www.resolv... [2] https://www.resolversystems.com [3] https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet

Congrats on the launch. Building a product of this complexity is no easy feat! Out of curiosity: given the old adage that a product needs to be 10x to overcome switching costs, how do you prove users that you are 10x better than Google Sheets or Excel?

can it handle a million rows? 10M?

believe it or not this is my biggest problem with Sheets, and while Excel does better it's still capped at 1M