Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

stenci.la

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 101 posts

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#61

Post by nokome »

steveeq1 wrote: post #53

Has 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 so…

Hi, article author here. I have never used Improv but while researching for this work I did read about it and yes, it did seem to have introduced several innovations to address flaws in the spreadsheet approach. The OSX Numbers app seems to have picked up some of these ideas. And, I'm hoping to apply some of them to Stencila Sheets too.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#62

Post by greggman »

ebiester wrote: post #5
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.

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 ?

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#63

Post by morgante »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #28
WorldMaker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

In the past I definitely found Powerpoint/Keynote to be pretty effective for mocking up rough wireframes.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#64

Post by nokome »

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…

Yes, you're right this doesn't solve all the issues with spreadsheets as a programming environment. The "averaging over the right data" is a big one, and yes, being able to diff a text file won't help that.

Thanks a lot for the suggested syntax - it's really good to get some feedback. I need more time to think it through and work out exactly how this would work.

In the meantime, one solution to the problem, that I would like to implement soon, is cell mapping - in effect projecting native data structures onto grid cells. That way you can still display and modify your data in the spreadsheet but use a sensible formula like `mean(data$height)` instead of `mean(A2:A5)`. Would love comments on that idea - there's an issue on it https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/118

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#65

Post by grahamburger »

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.

My experience has been that it always ends up in Google Docs. Collaboration in Docs is just so stupidly easy compared to emailing spreadsheets around. And yeah I've been through several cycles of this:

    start tracking in google docs, we'll get a system eventually. 
    -> OK we have bought a new PM system, let's start using it. 
    -> Everyone please start using the new system. Move your google docs there today. 
    -> I ... why is this still in Google Docs?
    -> Ok we've paid a bunch more money to get all of the requested features in our new system. Please please please start using it
    -> Sigh. Just share me on the Google Doc.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#66

Post by JadeNB »

blackbagboys wrote: post #34
giardini wrote: post #15

I 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…

> Sorry, I can't resist indulging in a moment of pedantry here.

I've always got the impression that this is, rather than an abuse, instead an intentional re-purposing of the slogan to convey exactly the meaning that it appears to have (instead of the one that it historically should). I'm a die-hard prescriptivist on most matters; but, since the sentiment that the grandparent expressed is common and the one the the literal historical slogan expresses doesn't seem to be, it's hard to see why we should cling to the latter and avoid the former.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#67

Post by nokome »

jmj42 wrote: post #33

It seems, perhaps, Resolver One's time has finally come. Alas, Resolver One (and Resolver Systems) died a slow death and ceased to be in 2012. Perhaps this will fare better. I always thought Resolver was a brilliant idea, but they never gained any traction against the heavy weights (Excel). Edit- Add link to Resolver One wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolver_One

Thanks for the link. I was aware of Pyspread (which sound similar) but not of Resolver One - I'll add a link in the article

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#68

Post by _7fvc »

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 example: Generate normal distribution - https://nxsheet.com/sheets/56e845da4030182e337c6c2b

Stencila looks interesting. Great work!

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#69

Post by nokome »

nokome wrote: post #19

Hey, Stencila developer here. Thanks to the original poster for sharing the link and for all the interest. Unfortunately, the site is not handling all that interest too well (R session hosting instances filling up, timeouts,...). I'm working on it but please bear with me while I try to stabilize things.

Thanks again for the interest. I've launched a few more workers on EC2 for all of you attempting to play with the demo sheet (each of you gets a Docker container running an R session). Things seem to have stabilized for now. A good robustness test - more work needed! Sigh.

Re: Stencila – Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment

#70

Post by kornish »

One project I've recently been wanting play around with is Beaker, which touts itself as a polyglot data science notebook tool. The pitch is that you can use the right tool for the job, no matter what questions you want to ask next to each other. It looks like an iPython notebook on steroids.

http://beakernotebook.com/ https://github.com/twosigma/beaker-notebook

Disclaimer (or not): no involvement, but looks very handy.

Post reply on HN