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> Your text system has obvious advantage of "text labels" over the desktop calculator but it doesn't have enough metadata primitives (e.g. timestamps & tags) to

> Your text system has obvious advantage of "text labels" over the desktop calculator but it doesn't have enough metadata primitives (e.g. timestamps & tags) to produce budget forecasts, goal planning, savings schedule (e.g. college fund, vacation fund, retirement, contingency reserves for house repairs and car repairs, etc). Yes, it has none of these features. Intentionally. Perhaps due to sheer stubbornness, I have used a collection of manually edited text files for most of these. It just came to a point where having a script to run calculations automatically became essential. And lately, I've found myself using the script for quick calculations. I wrote the web version as a way to avoid having to create a new text file just for that. But there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I actually want to explore creating a plugin API.

jasode 8y ago
>Yes, it has none of these features. Intentionally. Yes, I can see you designed the omission deliberately but what I don't understand is how to do effective budgeting without a timeline calculation. You need date&time metadata to facilitate planning and planning is budgeting. Budgets based only on arithmetic against snapshots of balances without incorporating a time horizon doesn't seem like "budgeting". >, I have used a collection of manually edited text files It looks like making text entries "simple" means shifting the "complexity" to multiple sheets (or multiple text files). The hidden implicit metadata is the filename conventions and organization of text files. >But there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I actually want to explore creating a plugin API. To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file.
- jgalvez 8y ago
  > To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file. Yeah, I myself use a few conventions for dates. I'll probably document and automate those soon.

jasode 8y ago

>Yes, it has none of these features. Intentionally. Yes, I can see you designed the omission deliberately but what I don't understand is how to do effective budgeting without a timeline calculation. You need date&time metadata to facilitate planning and planning is budgeting. Budgets based only on arithmetic against snapshots of balances without incorporating a time horizon doesn't seem like "budgeting". >, I have used a collection of manually edited text files It looks like making text entries "simple" means shifting the "complexity" to multiple sheets (or multiple text files). The hidden implicit metadata is the filename conventions and organization of text files. >But there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I actually want to explore creating a plugin API. To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file.

jgalvez 8y ago
> To clarify, I'm not saying your project is missing Javascript code to enable functionality of budget planning. I'm saying the data layer below that -- the text representation -- is missing basic metadata -- which handcuffs what future Javascript can do to generate basic budget reports and budget projections. A plugin API system usually does not create new incompatible data formats because of incomplete metadata in the base file. Yeah, I myself use a few conventions for dates. I'll probably document and automate those soon.