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Absolutely my favorite tech talk—brilliant idea that's explained so well it seems obvious in hindsight, even though it really wasn't. It's rare for a single tal

Absolutely my favorite tech talk—brilliant idea that's explained so well it seems obvious in hindsight, even though it really wasn't. It's rare for a single talk to change my fundamental way of thinking about an area I already care about (programming language design), and "Growing a Language" managed it in a big way. It applies to more than just language design too. Why do I love Emacs so much? It isn't the idiosyncratic terminology or weird keybindings, it's the fact that Emacs is an editor that grows. Once I understood basic Elisp, there was no real friction to take Emacs and start molding it to exactly my needs and preferences. Something I don't like? Something that's missing? I don't have to spend hours setting up a plugin to fix it; chances are it will only take a few lines to change whatever I want to change, and I can use Emacs's remarkable discovery features to quickly find which lines those are. Why do people swear by command-line invocations and bash? Bash is awful. But it's an environment that grows in a way that I've never seen with GUI apps. A small set of simple tools and a universal way to compose them is remarkably powerful, even if it's as awkward and error-prone as POSIX shell scripting. Excel? I don't use it myself, but I've seen the same thing from Excel power users: it goes beyond mere calculations to letting people seamlessly build what they need on top of Excel. Excel is integral to the modern world in a way that no other pieces of office software is because it can grow to solve complex problems in a way other tools can't. (With, as I've seen working at a large company, occasionally terrifying consequences.) What I would really love to see next is an alternative to Jupyter that can grow in the same way. Maybe gtoolkit[1] is a candidate? That's what I'm exploring now, and it's pretty exciting so far. [1]: https://gtoolkit.com/ https://gtoolkit.com/

datalus 6y ago
I used to work for a company that made simulation based corporate training games. All the data was modeled in Excel and served as a database to read from and write back to during runtime. The frontend was written in Flash. I was the sole frontend developer for one of the projects in this space and the backend had always amazed me. The Excel sheets were nuts :D
- stainforth 6y ago
  Training for what corporate purposes?
  - datalus 6y ago
    It was back in '07-'09, we would take a few server laptops and a whole bunch of loaner laptops out to internal corporate seminars/conventions at like Bank of America, Hilton, etc. It appears to still be active but using more modern devices and UX. [0] 0: https://www.abilitie.com/executive-challenge https://www.abilitie.com/executive-challenge
DylanDmitri 6y ago
Thank you for sharing gtoolkit! I’m also looking for the sequel to Jupyter, something that gives the same speed of iteration but with the ability to scale to production systems.

datalus 6y ago

I used to work for a company that made simulation based corporate training games. All the data was modeled in Excel and served as a database to read from and write back to during runtime. The frontend was written in Flash. I was the sole frontend developer for one of the projects in this space and the backend had always amazed me. The Excel sheets were nuts :D

stainforth 6y ago
Training for what corporate purposes?
- datalus 6y ago
  It was back in '07-'09, we would take a few server laptops and a whole bunch of loaner laptops out to internal corporate seminars/conventions at like Bank of America, Hilton, etc. It appears to still be active but using more modern devices and UX. [0] 0: https://www.abilitie.com/executive-challenge https://www.abilitie.com/executive-challenge

DylanDmitri 6y ago

Thank you for sharing gtoolkit! I’m also looking for the sequel to Jupyter, something that gives the same speed of iteration but with the ability to scale to production systems.