I yet to understand a reason for cell to be addressed by A1 or C1R1 style. put it in a table, give a column a name. Numbers got it right.
Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
121–130 of 221 posts
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#122On the surface this seems like an impossible market to penetrate. But you must know this. What is the deeper insight that one who thinks this is missing?
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#123LibreOffice Calc combined with python's pandas and numpy modules meet all needs I have for spreadsheets, with matplotlib and seaborn for visualization. The Ipython shell is the optimal IDE for this approach IMO. My desktop reference is: "Python for Data Analysis 2nd ed" (Wes McKinney, 2018)
And it's something that'll literally last forever. Not dependent on a company or pricing.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#124I've seen a bunch of companies do this. The problem is always that it isn't Excel. This means usually things like XLWings, Excel-DNA, etc. are actually more useful.
[flagged]
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#125Hey, this is awesome! As someone who primarily codes in Python, I love that it's first class with a REPL! Nothing frustrates me more then when I have to figure out Javascript for scripting in Google Sheets.
I ran through your demo and I have some feedback:
- Tab completion in the REPL would be great.
- When I change code in the editor, it doesn't update the cell where that code is used until I click on the cell, click away, and click back.
- When I ran the append function, it worked, but if I look at the array in the cell, it's unchanged. If I click on the cell and hit enter, it wipes out the append. I'm honestly not sure what the right behavior here is, I can see use cases on both sides. But initially I did expect the cell with the array to update with the new array.
- When I tried to do autocomplete on the capitals, it failed silently. I assume the API failed to fetch the capitals? It worked on the second try (but took a while).
- When I add a column into the sheet, it breaks all the code that has cell references. I'd expect the code with cell references to get updated unless my references are $F$4 for example, just like in the sheet itself.
Overall though this is a great start!
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#126Why do you require a login for the tutorial? I backed out because of it.
We just added a button to let you skip the sign-in for the tutorial: https://neptyne.com/neptyne/tutorial
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#127Why do you require a login for the tutorial? I backed out because of it.
[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct, that is the slicing syntax. We to carefully interpret the ":" in the right way. For example: sort(l, lambda A:F1(A)) doesn't invoke Sheet1[10:20] just returns the 10 to 20s row of that sheet, which I think is the most reasonable thing to do here
I assume you mean rows 11 to 20 like the Python syntax would do or is it different because spreadsheet row numbers start at 1 instead of 0?
Ah, yes, sorry, just Python based slicing. It follows the numpy rules
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#129The 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
(cofounder of Neptyne here) Thanks for mentioning this! I came across Resolve One recently in another HN thread. Were you a user yourself? What did you think of it?
I did try it, but that was ages ago. I remember going wow! and thinking this is the future of spreadsheet. Alas it didnt pan out that way.
One thing it had if I recall waell, was defining a function without having to go full VBA style scripting. It was more like a lambda you define in a cell.
Re: Launch HN: Neptyne (YC W23) – A programmable spreadsheet that runs Python
#130Looking for something like this exactly. Is it possible to install on site? No way my company would want prop data on a cloud.