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> Why do you think that doesn't scale? Because it doesn't. Watch Bret Victor's last talk about Eve. All those ideas fail when you give them to novices and try

• TuringTest 11y ago
  Yet end users are able to build fairly complex data structures and conditional processing using spreadsheets, so we know for sure that it can be done. Of course experimental tools will be severely limited compared with industrial IDE systems that have been polished literally for decades; it will take years before we get these new tools into shape and learn what their best use cases are. But I'm not skeptical, because I've seen it happen before, and the conditions for it are now better than ever.
  • EdiX 11y ago
    Spreadsheets IMHO are a solution space that hasn't been sufficiently explored. However they are not particularly visual (especially if you try to do complex things with them), they are very much domain specific they are extremely computationally inefficient, they're very hard to version and they become intractably complex much quicker than equivalent imperative or functional programs. I've thought about what could be done to improve on their weaknesses (like strong typing, bridging the gap to databases, better table naming), even wrote some code in this direction, but anything I can think of involves either making them less visual, less user friendly or both and doesn't even begin to address the lack of generality Finally I have to point out that some spreadsheets have been around for longer than many programming languages in current use so they don't actually lack maturity, yet they have seen little improvement in over a decade.