Spreadsheets are dreams | Hacker News Reader

Spreadsheets are dreams

medium.com

37 pointsakkartik12 comments

Treesheets (open-source for Mac, Windows, Linux) extends the spreadsheet user experience to general data organization, http://www.treesheets.com

Ever so often i think it would be interesting to see something akin to a spreadsheet for full on programming, that would display the state of every variable and constant much like a spreadsheet shows the result of the formula within.

I guess it could be compared to the "blinkenlights" of old mainframes and minis, showing the state of various CPU registers etc.

The "watches" feature of most debuggers give you something like that.

Having said that, debuggers don't give you the ability to graphical visualize dependencies between formulas/expressions that Excel does.

Check out Kayia: https://vimeo.com/107069470

Fowler called this illustrative programming http://martinfowler.com/bliki/IllustrativeProgramming.html

Most debuggers are useless at showing what you want to see. VB.net is missing one of the really useful features of VB6 and that is the ability to stop when a variable changed value.

You might enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge

In this presentation, Felienne Hermans makes the point that spreadsheets themselves are already a programming platform with a wide audience, all that is lacking is tools for "compile-time" validation, refactoring and testing: https://vimeo.com/145492419

That's a really nice idea - fancy a deep dive into say python pdb?

Bacon used sand to add texture to a painting of Van Gogh.

This threw me for a loop. I suppose adding "Francis" wouldn't have helped much, but when I see the single name I think of the philosopher, scientist, Attorney General, and Lord Chancellor (who died long before Van Gogh lived), not the painter.

Off topic

Is it a new trend on medium.com to use grainy GIFs with "shivering gaudy text" (text in gaudy colors moving back and forth with a grainy image in the background)? I noticed a similar usage in another article a week or so ago. Apart from looking really terrible (IMO), it would be useful to put a seizure trigger warning before such images are even shown.

Yes, this is troubling. If live experiments are going to be run on readers, it would be safer to have live sensors hooked up to the readers, rather than broadcasting to thousands of anonymous viewers.

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