7 ms·

Spreadsheets are dreams (2015)

74 points by dhotson 4y ago

dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time: Spreadsheets are dreams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569155 - Nov 2015 (12 comments)
jmull 4y ago
Beautiful piece. A poem in parts. I think spreadsheets are one of the most powerful mind-extensions people developed from the Information Age. But as far as they can take you, it's worth remembering they're only extending our human minds, going in the direction we point them. They labor only for the narratives we set them to and fail according to our own misconceptions.
- kristov 4y ago
  Totally agree. It's interesting to ponder where the ditest for spreadsheets comes from. You can make a mess in any programming language after all. With conventional imperative programming languages there is a kind of "culture" of sorts, collectively owned by programmers. It presents a fairly difficult barrier to entry, and has been built up over time as people learn from mistakes. But it's interesting that this culture doesn't really "live" anywhere centralized - there is no actual guild of programmers with a book of rules, even if we feel like there is (or is that feeling all that is needed for it to exist?) But spreadsheets don't really have this. This is a blessing and and a curse. When you build something in a spreadsheet it's not going to be critiqued by anyone. But also no one is going to teach you the "right way". There is no "sheethub" to host your little project and get stars and merge requests, and get good and bad feels. I spend a lot of time thinking about spreadsheets, but I never actually use them. I also spend a lot of time imagining what programming will look like in 100 years time. I don't have anything to show from that process. Maybe I would sketch my thoughts in a spreadsheet so no one would critique them. But then I would never learn anything I guess. I would like to see spreadsheets and regular programming languages reconcile some how. I think both have a lot to learn from each other. Regular programming language culture has a lot of baggage that doesn't get questioned often. It's easy for programmers to look down on spreadsheeters, and yet the sheets keep coming.
janci 4y ago
Sure, nightmares qualify as dreams.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
The problem with spreadsheets is that they are a straitjacket for many of the users who don't realize that there are so often better ways of achieving their ends.
- mirntyfirty 4y ago
  True. The levels of complexity taken on by spreadsheets is astounding. Couple this with how difficult it can be to own a database in a corporate context and the company ends up with hundreds of spreadsheets that must be maintained across shared drives along with buggy macros.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    Which speaks to the problem not being with spreadsheets, but with their alternatives. You want a better database used by your employees? Don't make it a 6-month requisition process or a $10k/table/month ongoing cost for the team. Spreadsheets can be used now by the people that need to get work done, and many of the better options are barred to them by cost, accessibility, or training. Same for planning programs and workflow management. Some systems (like JIRA, actually) are quite malleable, if you're permitted to make those changes and create custom workflows. But many corporations mandate a system like that but then lock it down so that the teams aren't able to use it effectively. The same happens with many other better alternatives to spreadsheets.
- robonerd 4y ago
  For people with a self-perception of not being programmers (in other words, most people) spreadsheets are often the easiest and most flexible way to leverage a computer's ability to automate whatever their novel task is. Without spreadsheets, they'd either need to learn how to code or hire a programmer. Hiring a programmer to solve your special problem is a high bar to clear, and most people will never become programmers for various reasons. If you took spreadsheets away, I think most spreadsheet users would begrudgingly go back to pencils and pocket calculators.
aarondia 4y ago
In the spirit of dreams and poetry: __________________ Spreadsheets are my desired cuisine. Excel the dish I adore. But fill it up with too many ingredients, and you’ll find Excel on the floor. It happens all the more frequent now, as my grocery store is now a warehouse So I pound my fists and curse and yell, and leave Excel in the guesthouse. Lost without Excel, in a ‘landscape where nothing officially exists’ I saw a single cell appear above the dune in a hazy mist Running up the dune, the grid displayed with all its might A new spreadsheet designed for my growing appetite. __________________ I’m one of the founders of Mito [1] (and a very bad poet). Like Spreadsheets are Dreams discusses, we believe that spreadsheets are the most powerful low-code tool because of their versatility to capture the simplicity or complexity of nearly any analysis. As my poem tries to highlight, existing spreadsheet tools like Excel are not designed for today’s growing data sets. Today's spreadsheets should help users leverage their Excel skills while upgrading to a more robust and powerful environment like Python. Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your Jupyter environment. You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits. Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but instead of generating VBA code, it generates Python. [1] https://www.trymito.io/ https://www.trymito.io/
jnwatson 4y ago
Another way to put it: Excel is the leading tool to author boring science fiction.
boiledrope 4y ago
Concrete poetry
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
... I'm adding A1 and the 7C Everybody's looking to SUM() things
bradrn 4y ago
> Every cell can contain text, data or formulae; every cell, row and column may be endlessly multiplied and referenced. These two qualities make spreadsheets an indeterminate material matrix — the textured all-over-ness of a Pollock painting. Or the empty space of a desert landscape in whose expansive lines could be written every story. > Spreadsheets can render scenarios with total variability, but the complexity needed to turn every product, object, idea or structure in a spreadsheet into a twiddlable dial or live display often suffocates the insight in a sandstorm of choking numbers. … There seem to be quite a few recent tools which try to solve this problem by replacing the grid paradigm with something a bit more structured. The main ones I’m aware of are https://inflex.io/ https://inflex.io/ and https://www.trymito.io/ https://www.trymito.io/, but there are many more, and I even had a go at making one myself. I’m not optimistic about their chances in general, though. Traditional spreadsheet UIs are immensely flexible, and great for small calculations and anything involving tables or lists. They also happen to be utterly awful at anything even remotely large-scale, but by the time people figure that out, it’s usually too late to switch as the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in. On the other hand, what are the alternatives? Programming languages require a fairly significant expenditure of effort to learn, and don’t give nearly the amount of interactivity that spreadsheets do. Even environments like Jupyter notebooks, or the MATLAB IDE, don’t come close. Besides, in the hands of the unskilled — and even the skilled, really — programs for data analysis can become nearly as messy as spreadsheets, especially with popular languages like Python and MATLAB. For these reasons, though I utterly despise spreadsheets, I am also beginning to despair of ever successfully replacing them with something better: spreadsheets are just too convenient, so why would anyone use anything else? Excel is always going to be more convenient in the moment than any more principled tool, precisely because it is infinitely flexible and has no restrictions. People don’t like friction in their UX when they just want to do a few calculations. There is an avenue to wide usage for tools like Mito (linked above), which give programmers a more spreadsheet-like interface, and so integrate nicely into workflows which already exist. But this approach is in itself limiting; I want a tool I can open and use right now, not one where I have to make a whole new Python environment and notebook and so on just to do a simple calculation. Alas, I see no way to get wide adoption, or perhaps even adoption by myself, for any ‘better spreadsheet’ implementation.
- 4y ago
pete_nic 4y ago
Spreadsheets are one of the most ubiquitous business tools in the world. Similar to email, another ubiquitous business tool, there are good uses and bad uses of the tool. Users need to know when to use them, when to not use them, and when to move onto something more robust. > So they’re at their best when you have a foundation to build on — a decent number of fixed assumptions atop which you want to see the effect over time or scale of a limited number of variables. See the myriad permutations proliferate from a small number of questions.
Mikeb85 4y ago
I'm not the biggest spreadsheet fan but they do make data easy to understand for people who don't understand data or programming. You can have a visual representation of the data itself with the mathematical formulas and results all on one page. They also make entering data easy. Being able to just whip up a spreadsheet in a few minutes to show calculations to someone who isn't tech or math savvy is useful. That being said, for my own purposes I'd rather use a programming language + file/database representation of the data.
fatih-erikli 4y ago
Here's a 3 model rendered in a spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Lg8icHa-F0NlGPC5W1H2P4cwYUwxl5dw0pFr5nqgf4 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Lg8icHa-F0NlGPC5W1H...
jesprenj 4y ago
That drawing reminds me of a C script I wrote to convert a PGM image into a spreadsheet (fods) (: I can't find the actual script, but here are two images: http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.fods http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.fods http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/lena.fods http://1507103400/krneki/lena.fods http://1507103400/krneki/lena.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/lena.xlsx XLSX versions are both less than 2 MiB, while FODS uncompressed XML plaintext are around 30 MiB (:

74 points by dhotson 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time: Spreadsheets are dreams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569155 - Nov 2015 (12 comments)

jmull 4y ago

Beautiful piece. A poem in parts. I think spreadsheets are one of the most powerful mind-extensions people developed from the Information Age. But as far as they can take you, it's worth remembering they're only extending our human minds, going in the direction we point them. They labor only for the narratives we set them to and fail according to our own misconceptions.

kristov 4y ago
Totally agree. It's interesting to ponder where the ditest for spreadsheets comes from. You can make a mess in any programming language after all. With conventional imperative programming languages there is a kind of "culture" of sorts, collectively owned by programmers. It presents a fairly difficult barrier to entry, and has been built up over time as people learn from mistakes. But it's interesting that this culture doesn't really "live" anywhere centralized - there is no actual guild of programmers with a book of rules, even if we feel like there is (or is that feeling all that is needed for it to exist?) But spreadsheets don't really have this. This is a blessing and and a curse. When you build something in a spreadsheet it's not going to be critiqued by anyone. But also no one is going to teach you the "right way". There is no "sheethub" to host your little project and get stars and merge requests, and get good and bad feels. I spend a lot of time thinking about spreadsheets, but I never actually use them. I also spend a lot of time imagining what programming will look like in 100 years time. I don't have anything to show from that process. Maybe I would sketch my thoughts in a spreadsheet so no one would critique them. But then I would never learn anything I guess. I would like to see spreadsheets and regular programming languages reconcile some how. I think both have a lot to learn from each other. Regular programming language culture has a lot of baggage that doesn't get questioned often. It's easy for programmers to look down on spreadsheeters, and yet the sheets keep coming.

janci 4y ago

Sure, nightmares qualify as dreams.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

The problem with spreadsheets is that they are a straitjacket for many of the users who don't realize that there are so often better ways of achieving their ends.

mirntyfirty 4y ago
True. The levels of complexity taken on by spreadsheets is astounding. Couple this with how difficult it can be to own a database in a corporate context and the company ends up with hundreds of spreadsheets that must be maintained across shared drives along with buggy macros.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  Which speaks to the problem not being with spreadsheets, but with their alternatives. You want a better database used by your employees? Don't make it a 6-month requisition process or a $10k/table/month ongoing cost for the team. Spreadsheets can be used now by the people that need to get work done, and many of the better options are barred to them by cost, accessibility, or training. Same for planning programs and workflow management. Some systems (like JIRA, actually) are quite malleable, if you're permitted to make those changes and create custom workflows. But many corporations mandate a system like that but then lock it down so that the teams aren't able to use it effectively. The same happens with many other better alternatives to spreadsheets.
robonerd 4y ago
For people with a self-perception of not being programmers (in other words, most people) spreadsheets are often the easiest and most flexible way to leverage a computer's ability to automate whatever their novel task is. Without spreadsheets, they'd either need to learn how to code or hire a programmer. Hiring a programmer to solve your special problem is a high bar to clear, and most people will never become programmers for various reasons. If you took spreadsheets away, I think most spreadsheet users would begrudgingly go back to pencils and pocket calculators.

aarondia 4y ago

In the spirit of dreams and poetry: __________________ Spreadsheets are my desired cuisine. Excel the dish I adore. But fill it up with too many ingredients, and you’ll find Excel on the floor. It happens all the more frequent now, as my grocery store is now a warehouse So I pound my fists and curse and yell, and leave Excel in the guesthouse. Lost without Excel, in a ‘landscape where nothing officially exists’ I saw a single cell appear above the dune in a hazy mist Running up the dune, the grid displayed with all its might A new spreadsheet designed for my growing appetite. __________________ I’m one of the founders of Mito [1] (and a very bad poet). Like Spreadsheets are Dreams discusses, we believe that spreadsheets are the most powerful low-code tool because of their versatility to capture the simplicity or complexity of nearly any analysis. As my poem tries to highlight, existing spreadsheet tools like Excel are not designed for today’s growing data sets. Today's spreadsheets should help users leverage their Excel skills while upgrading to a more robust and powerful environment like Python. Mito is a spreadsheet extension to your Jupyter environment. You can display any Pandas dataframe as a spreadsheet, and edit it in a very similar way to Excel. For each edit you make, it generates the corresponding Python code below for those edits. Practically, you can think about Mito as recording a macro, but instead of generating VBA code, it generates Python. [1] https://www.trymito.io/ https://www.trymito.io/

jnwatson 4y ago

Another way to put it: Excel is the leading tool to author boring science fiction.

boiledrope 4y ago

Concrete poetry

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

... I'm adding A1 and the 7C Everybody's looking to SUM() things

bradrn 4y ago

> Every cell can contain text, data or formulae; every cell, row and column may be endlessly multiplied and referenced. These two qualities make spreadsheets an indeterminate material matrix — the textured all-over-ness of a Pollock painting. Or the empty space of a desert landscape in whose expansive lines could be written every story. > Spreadsheets can render scenarios with total variability, but the complexity needed to turn every product, object, idea or structure in a spreadsheet into a twiddlable dial or live display often suffocates the insight in a sandstorm of choking numbers. … There seem to be quite a few recent tools which try to solve this problem by replacing the grid paradigm with something a bit more structured. The main ones I’m aware of are https://inflex.io/ https://inflex.io/ and https://www.trymito.io/ https://www.trymito.io/, but there are many more, and I even had a go at making one myself. I’m not optimistic about their chances in general, though. Traditional spreadsheet UIs are immensely flexible, and great for small calculations and anything involving tables or lists. They also happen to be utterly awful at anything even remotely large-scale, but by the time people figure that out, it’s usually too late to switch as the sunk-cost fallacy kicks in. On the other hand, what are the alternatives? Programming languages require a fairly significant expenditure of effort to learn, and don’t give nearly the amount of interactivity that spreadsheets do. Even environments like Jupyter notebooks, or the MATLAB IDE, don’t come close. Besides, in the hands of the unskilled — and even the skilled, really — programs for data analysis can become nearly as messy as spreadsheets, especially with popular languages like Python and MATLAB. For these reasons, though I utterly despise spreadsheets, I am also beginning to despair of ever successfully replacing them with something better: spreadsheets are just too convenient, so why would anyone use anything else? Excel is always going to be more convenient in the moment than any more principled tool, precisely because it is infinitely flexible and has no restrictions. People don’t like friction in their UX when they just want to do a few calculations. There is an avenue to wide usage for tools like Mito (linked above), which give programmers a more spreadsheet-like interface, and so integrate nicely into workflows which already exist. But this approach is in itself limiting; I want a tool I can open and use right now, not one where I have to make a whole new Python environment and notebook and so on just to do a simple calculation. Alas, I see no way to get wide adoption, or perhaps even adoption by myself, for any ‘better spreadsheet’ implementation.

4y ago

pete_nic 4y ago

Spreadsheets are one of the most ubiquitous business tools in the world. Similar to email, another ubiquitous business tool, there are good uses and bad uses of the tool. Users need to know when to use them, when to not use them, and when to move onto something more robust. > So they’re at their best when you have a foundation to build on — a decent number of fixed assumptions atop which you want to see the effect over time or scale of a limited number of variables. See the myriad permutations proliferate from a small number of questions.

Mikeb85 4y ago

I'm not the biggest spreadsheet fan but they do make data easy to understand for people who don't understand data or programming. You can have a visual representation of the data itself with the mathematical formulas and results all on one page. They also make entering data easy. Being able to just whip up a spreadsheet in a few minutes to show calculations to someone who isn't tech or math savvy is useful. That being said, for my own purposes I'd rather use a programming language + file/database representation of the data.

fatih-erikli 4y ago

Here's a 3 model rendered in a spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Lg8icHa-F0NlGPC5W1H2P4cwYUwxl5dw0pFr5nqgf4 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Lg8icHa-F0NlGPC5W1H...

jesprenj 4y ago

That drawing reminds me of a C script I wrote to convert a PGM image into a spreadsheet (fods) (: I can't find the actual script, but here are two images: http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.fods http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.fods http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/stalin.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/lena.fods http://1507103400/krneki/lena.fods http://1507103400/krneki/lena.xlsx http://1507103400/krneki/lena.xlsx XLSX versions are both less than 2 MiB, while FODS uncompressed XML plaintext are around 30 MiB (: