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Spreadsheets are the most intuitive programming environment known to man. Every time you reach for Excel to mung your data, that's opening a repl. The only prob
by repsilat 10y ago
Spreadsheets are the most intuitive programming environment known to man. Every time you reach for Excel to mung your data, that's opening a repl. The only problem is that Google and Microsoft don't care enough to make them powerful enough to do general purpose computation with, fast enough to build large systems with, versionable enough to enable large teams to use them.
- csours 10y ago> Spreadsheets are the most intuitive programming environment known to man. Every time you reach for Excel to mung your data, that's opening a repl. I absolutely agree - REPLs are excellent for prototyping and exploring data and ideas, and spreadsheets are excellent in that role. Allow me to ask you this then: when was the last time you shipped prototype code? Unless you live dangerously, you don't ship prototype code! > The only problem is that Google and Microsoft don't care enough to make them powerful enough to do general purpose computation with, fast enough to build large systems with, versionable enough to enable large teams to use them. I would counter that a more important problem is "productionalizing" spreadsheets - all of the fiddly things you do to ensure inputs are in the right format, etc, etc, along with testing, securing, and deploying code.
- csharpminor 10y agoYou might check out Airtable. They do a good job of this.