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Show HN: Alphasheets – Write Python, R, and SQL in your spreadsheets
- fiatjaf 10y agoThat's amazing. How do you do it?
- ESRogs 10y agoThey'd probably answer, "With Haskell."
- fiatjaf 10y agoI would be satisfied with that answer.
- fiatjaf 10y agoIn fact it is probably all Javascript. The formula editor at the top is an Ace editor, the spreadsheet itself is based on https://github.com/openfin/fin-hypergrid https://github.com/openfin/fin-hypergrid, which is an incredibly enourmous piece of software I had never heard of and which I don't understand at all what it is trying to accomplish, but I can see it renders to canvas.
- zgao 10y agoCEO of AlphaSheets here! Javascript is our frontend, but the backend is Haskell :)
- m_mueller 10y agoSo the computations are server-side? Or are you doing some Haskell-to-JS-transpiling?
- alexzhu 10y agoYes, the computations are all done server-side, which lets us parallelize big computations. It also keeps our thorny evaluation logic crisp and maintainable, because Haskell. =)
- sandGorgon 10y agowhat's your opinion on various spreadsheet like JS frameworks like Handsontable, Crossfilter, NxSheet and fin-hypergrid ? As someone who has built an internal dashboard using Handsontable, I am yet to find a truly reactive JS framework for spreadsheets.
- fiatjaf 10y agoWhat do you mean by "truly reactive" in this case?
- sandGorgon 10y agoFormulas that get recomputed if the cells are relevant. A spreadsheet is inherently reactive.
- alexzhu 10y agoWe're actually built on top of fin-hypergrid, which we chose for its speed. We're handling all the reactivity in the backend.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- asafira 10y agoI am friends with one of the cofounders --- these guys have been working hard on this for a while. It looks great!
- caseyf7 10y agoAwesome demo. I've seen a few others with Python but I'm looking forward to using R with this.
- dang 10y agoYou can't put "Show HN" on something that isn't ready for people play with. Signup pages are explicitly excluded: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. When it's ready for people to try out, by all means do a Show HN then. In the meantime we've taken that out of the title.
- alexzhu 10y agoHey! I'm Alex, a cofounder of AlphaSheets. The three gifs on the page link to spreadsheets that you can play around with, with a majority of features already functional. Is that not fair game for Show HN? (I will admit that this isn't immediately obvious, so I apologize for any resultant confusion.)
- ystvn 10y agoFor Python use, what would be the case for using this over something like xlwings -- what are the main benefits over xlwings?
- robocaptain 10y agoThe demos all look really great! I got really excited at first, wondering if this all took place inside Excel. Realizing now that's not quite what is going on here but probably aiming for a similar experience.
- fiatjaf 10y agoYou can click on the examples and see and edit the actual sheets behind.
- robocaptain 10y agoThanks. I edited my comment - wasn't able to get through to the spreadsheets before, but I see what's going on now, I think.
- alexzhu 10y agoWe're taking that as a compliment. From talking to users, a key piece of feedback we've gotten was that the experience of using AlphaSheets has to be really similar to that of using Excel.
- fiatjaf 10y agoIt's impossible to do these things inside Excel, I guess. Things like xlwings or https://www.blockspring.com/ https://www.blockspring.com/ try to make Excel better, but there are way too much assumptions going down there. The experience with "objects" with the Blockspring add-in, for example, is terrible terrible.
- egastfriend 10y agoWow this is awesome!
- narayan2016 10y agoVery cool. Looks elegant and professional. Good luck to you guys.
- narayan2016 10y agoDoes this support sharing and collaboration ?
- alexzhu 10y agoYes, it does. Live updating already works (i.e. if A and B have a sheet open and A updates it, B sees the updates at the same time as A). And you can share links with others. These features are disabled for the demo, though.
- edimaudo 10y agoLooks pretty good. Great job!