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Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

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Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#21

Post by dbpokorny »

koz1000 wrote: post #18
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…

Sooner or later, all project management ends up in Excel. Doesn't matter what ticket or tracking tool you've paid for.

Yes, it goes from Excel to Microsoft Project to the plotter to the wall. And then beings the multi-year process of watching the baseline and targets drift away from each other like ships at sea...

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#23

Post by giardini »

wrong_variable wrote: post #2

Spreadsheets are optimized for data entry. Try entering CVS data manually using a text editor. Without Excel there would be no way for my sales/marketing team to give me valuable data to process at the backend. If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry.

"If you have been doing programming in excel for the past 20 years then you are simply a fool - sorry."

You've got to be kidding! Excel programmers rarely worry about the next paycheck. Programming in Excel may not be the most invigorating intellectual pursuit but it's a helluva steady job - there's always something that needs fixing!

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#26

Post by sumoboy »

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…

How many times have we heard over decades now "yada yada yda is dead" as a headline? Cobol, CD's, PC's, even vinyl records, nothing really dies and especially Excel which will probably still be used for decades to come.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#28

Post by drivingmenuts »

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.

Not nearly as bad as the office monkeys who use Powerpoint as a medium of image delivery.

To their graphic designer ...

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#29

Post by Mikeb85 »

mattbowen wrote: post #11

I'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 --…

Try R and RStudio. It excels at 'poking around' data.

In addition, you can show any data frame as a spreadsheet of data, import/export CSV files, etc... Knitr, Shiny, Plotly and other technologies also make producing documents, graphs and whatnot super easy.

This Stencila also looks cool though. Spreadsheet + R....

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#30

Post by adamhyde »

sumoboy wrote: post #26
sevensor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many times have we heard over decades now "yada yada yda is dead" as a headline? Cobol, CD's, PC's, even vinyl records, nothing really dies and especially Excel which will probably still be used for decades to come.

Its just a catch phrase. Get over it. Read the article, it makes a whole lot of sense and is a very sensible approach.
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