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To be fair, he wrote a spreadsheet engine that could run one particular spreadsheet. Admittedly a complex one, but it was a fixed set of functions that he neede

To be fair, he wrote a spreadsheet engine that could run one particular spreadsheet. Admittedly a complex one, but it was a fixed set of functions that he needed to implement and not and endless tail of things that people expect Excel to do. I think I'd probably have argued more about the UI spec and down some Excel behind the scenes but it is a familiar UI if you've got lots of number inputs all over the place. I've always enjoyed this article about building a spreadsheet in 100 lines of F#: https://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/ https://tomasp.net/blog/2018/write-your-own-excel/ The expansion from that to the feature set needed here is manageable.

brap 3y ago
Project requirements are never fixed, they’re always evolving. It was only a matter of time before users would’ve complained about features being missing/broken, especially since what they’re used to is Excel and this was meant to replace it.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > this was meant to replace it. I think that's a very generous read of what I said the requirements for this product were.
  - brap 3y ago
    > "The city teams only know how to use Excel, just make it like Excel." With those expectations, sooner or later someone would have said "hey wait a minute, why isn't this like Excel? Excel knows how to do X, but this can't do X! I thought we talked about this, just make it like Excel!", repeat until you have a full blown Excel.