6 ms·

One thing I've never found is a decent spreadsheet program that'll run in curses. Otherwise, terminal + browser gets me through 90% of the day.

4ad 15y ago
I do all the things one might use a spreadsheet for in awk :-). One might say it's slower then a spreadsheet. I don't know. I can type an one liner awk summation/average, faster then it takes OpenOffice to load. This is to me the most common spreadsheet operation. For more complex task, I feel that I'm working faster in awk (it's a full blown high level programming language, after all). I'm not sure it it's actually faster or if it's only my opinion though. I'm happy with this setup.
- rufibarbatus 15y ago
  Financial consultant here. I use Haskell for this kind of thing. In the event that I need a visual prototype to work with, together with a client or business partner, I don't think it's all that horrible to prototype something in Excel, and later port it to Haskell if necessary. But that's of course because I already, at some point, reinvented the wheel to make this possible. So now I'm mostly just reusing code which I already have available.
  - 4ad 15y ago
    Awk makes it trivially easy to parse text. How does Haskell handle this parsing task? I am curious because I've always wanted to learn Haskell, mainly because of its lazy evaluation, but hadn't had the time yet. Hope to do it soon.
    - rufibarbatus 15y ago
      Out of the box, it might not be the most intuitive text parsing tool indeed. It's trivial, but not immediately intuitive. That said: strings are lists of chars, and Haskell is strong at pattern matching (esp within lists) in a bunch of different ways, so trivial text parsing tasks are trivial and intuitive in Haskell. For anything slightly more complex, there are regular expression and enumerating libraries which can do the job alright (and efficiently if I may say so). EDIT: I'm sorry, can you give me an example of a problem so I can give you an example of a solution? :-)
  - zobzu 15y ago
    im using python for this. just cause its simple and it just works.
keeperofdakeys 15y ago
From what I have used of lotus123, it was quite a decent program. I'm sure you could find a lotus-inspired program somewhere.
- danohuiginn 15y ago
  Thanks for the tip. MacroCalc seems to fit the bill - http://www.freakout.de/#mc http://www.freakout.de/#mc [haven't tried it yet]
chimeracoder 15y ago
Personally, I use R. Importing and exporting CSV files in R is trivially easy (it's what it's made for, after all). Doing transformations on an entire column or row at a time is also very simple. Import a csv, then take the logarithm of one column and plot that against some transformation of another column? No problem - two lines in R, and still highly readable.
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icebraining 15y ago
Possibly Oleo[1] or Teapot[2]? [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ [2]: http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/ http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/
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access_denied 15y ago
emacs has at least 2 of them that work
RexRollman 15y ago
There is always SC. And of course, Google Docs exists.
lloeki 15y ago
I end up using Python. In the end it's much more powerful and less error-prone (the oops factor of spreadsheet apps is ginormous). Quality plot, graph and stat modules abound. Plus it has the advantage of being able to trivially scale in any direction, like refactoring or working on a real database (sqlite) when the dataset grows instead of shoehorning a database into a sheet, or making a module out of it, or integrating it with other random tools.

4ad 15y ago

I do all the things one might use a spreadsheet for in awk :-). One might say it's slower then a spreadsheet. I don't know. I can type an one liner awk summation/average, faster then it takes OpenOffice to load. This is to me the most common spreadsheet operation. For more complex task, I feel that I'm working faster in awk (it's a full blown high level programming language, after all). I'm not sure it it's actually faster or if it's only my opinion though. I'm happy with this setup.

rufibarbatus 15y ago
Financial consultant here. I use Haskell for this kind of thing. In the event that I need a visual prototype to work with, together with a client or business partner, I don't think it's all that horrible to prototype something in Excel, and later port it to Haskell if necessary. But that's of course because I already, at some point, reinvented the wheel to make this possible. So now I'm mostly just reusing code which I already have available.
- 4ad 15y ago
  Awk makes it trivially easy to parse text. How does Haskell handle this parsing task? I am curious because I've always wanted to learn Haskell, mainly because of its lazy evaluation, but hadn't had the time yet. Hope to do it soon.
  - rufibarbatus 15y ago
    Out of the box, it might not be the most intuitive text parsing tool indeed. It's trivial, but not immediately intuitive. That said: strings are lists of chars, and Haskell is strong at pattern matching (esp within lists) in a bunch of different ways, so trivial text parsing tasks are trivial and intuitive in Haskell. For anything slightly more complex, there are regular expression and enumerating libraries which can do the job alright (and efficiently if I may say so). EDIT: I'm sorry, can you give me an example of a problem so I can give you an example of a solution? :-)
- zobzu 15y ago
  im using python for this. just cause its simple and it just works.

keeperofdakeys 15y ago

From what I have used of lotus123, it was quite a decent program. I'm sure you could find a lotus-inspired program somewhere.

danohuiginn 15y ago
Thanks for the tip. MacroCalc seems to fit the bill - http://www.freakout.de/#mc http://www.freakout.de/#mc [haven't tried it yet]

chimeracoder 15y ago

Personally, I use R. Importing and exporting CSV files in R is trivially easy (it's what it's made for, after all). Doing transformations on an entire column or row at a time is also very simple. Import a csv, then take the logarithm of one column and plot that against some transformation of another column? No problem - two lines in R, and still highly readable.

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icebraining 15y ago

Possibly Oleo[1] or Teapot[2]? [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ http://www.gnu.org/software/oleo/ [2]: http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/ http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

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access_denied 15y ago

emacs has at least 2 of them that work

RexRollman 15y ago

There is always SC. And of course, Google Docs exists.

lloeki 15y ago

I end up using Python. In the end it's much more powerful and less error-prone (the oops factor of spreadsheet apps is ginormous). Quality plot, graph and stat modules abound. Plus it has the advantage of being able to trivially scale in any direction, like refactoring or working on a real database (sqlite) when the dataset grows instead of shoehorning a database into a sheet, or making a module out of it, or integrating it with other random tools.