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Man, I remember my Dad excitedly showing me Visicalc on our Apple II when he came home from working at Kodak. He loved it and I remember playing with it a bunch
by tunesmith 7y ago
Man, I remember my Dad excitedly showing me Visicalc on our Apple II when he came home from working at Kodak. He loved it and I remember playing with it a bunch as well. There's something pretty magical about it.
And I still think there's room for innovation. Not something cloud-based, but something that lies in the middle between a classic spreadsheet, and other concepts like Jupyter or the Mac's "Calca" app.
What I don't like about spreadsheets is that you can't document them, like literate explanations about what the calculation is or why. You can do that in Jupyter documents, but bringing in reactive calculations to Jupyter is still a very hacky affair, akin to invoking "recompile entire document" after every adjustment.
If I could have something that was more like a spreadsheet, meaning reactive calculations as a first class concept, but still one step away from the grid UI with room for documentation and explanation, I'd be very happy. Literate Spreadsheets, basically.
- snaily 7y agoI believe mbostock's https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/ is trying to do that A guide was linked the other day: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javascript https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/observables-not-javas...
- tunesmith 7y agoThis is encouraging and I will try it out for some purposes, but without the ability to run it privately and offline, it means there are some documents and data I'd never use it for.
- Areading314 7y agoI'm working on something along those lines: http://www.solvifier.com http://www.solvifier.com You can create financial models and turn them into APIs. The model-building aspect is basically as you describe and supports markdown documentation.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> What I don't like about spreadsheets is that you can't document them, like literate explanations about what the calculation is or why. You know that both Excel and LibreOffice Calc have a notes feature right?
- tunesmith 7y agoYes, but it's not sufficient. Apple's Numbers had possibilities in this regard in that you could have multiple spreadsheet tables within a larger document that might have surrounding explanation, although you're wrestling with text in a text box for that. And Numbers itself is pretty inadequate for even intermediate spreadsheet usage - for instance it doesn't have XIRR or XNPV. Take Jupyter's flexibility, add in tables, multiple sheets-per-documents, and reactive calculation, and allow it to run offline or as desktop software, and you're getting close.
- refrigerator 7y agoWe're working on something like this: https://causal.app https://causal.app :) I think just having proper names and descriptions for entities (variables, charts, etc.) will be a big improvement over unnamed cell references (E5, AA2) when trying to understand how a model works, and being able to document + audit changes to the model/data is the next piece on top.
- tomjen3 7y agoYou can do literate Spreadsheets in Org mode, and you can even combine it with lists, or output of other programming languages, possibly mixed and chained. However at that level of power you have a useful tools as a programmer, not something that can be used by mere mortals.