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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I like watching that 1996 WebObjects presentation [0] just to see how technically detailed Jobs could get, in a time before Apple could just dominate the consumer attention span with the slick, adjective-heavy presentations they have today. He's taking questions from the audience, people are walking around in the middle of the presentation. He may not have been a programmer but he knew how to talk about the details, not just talk about the big and beautiful ideas.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk

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It is something always amusing to see an old video explaining to a selection of experts, "here is what dynamic html is and what you could do with it" when you know what it has become since. I particularly like the part where the submit button on a web page fires up an excel session on the server, which calculates a price and returns it in the html! I wonder why we don't do more of that today!

It could be interesting to take spreadsheets and compile them into functions.

You'd get a DSL with an incredibly powerful IDE and interpreter for development basically for free.

Not to mention one that non-developers already know and are productive in.

Good point. There's no reason we couldn't have Excel as a headless DLL and spreadsheets compiled into a nice useful bytecode except that the software itself is a complete trainwreck of legacy issues.

You have server side excel engines like spreadsheetgear. But my comment was ironic. I am not really suggesting it is a good idea.

But I like the idea of converting an Excel logic to a DLL automatically. It's non trivial as Excel allows to do some pretty messy things. As soon as someone uses OFFSET or INDIRECT, all bets are off in term of what the spreadsheet may do.

I don't think it's a bad idea either. You might not be able to reasonably support all features Excel has but you could still provide some value with a subset.

I think this could be quite useful not so much when you're starting something from scratch necessarily but maybe you already have spreadsheets that implement some algorithm. In these cases having a compiler translate the spreadsheet would probably make more sense than having a human do it.

you can also use Excel services architecture: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ms582023.asp...

this is how WebWORQ and ReportWORQ operate

Disclosure: I worked on both of them

Not directly related, but Microsoft PowerApps have a very Excel-like feel to them, except you're using formulas to wire up arbitrary controls that you've placed on the canvas, and various tabular or hierarchical data sources, rather than grid cells.

A bit of a duplicate comment that my response to melchebo above: looking at it quickly, it looks like it addresses a different problem. PowerApps seems to be directed at giving business users the ability to quickly create a simple CRUD application / website. But I think the use case where the business logic has to sit in Excel and be owned by the business is where you have a complex logic in Excel, like a tax calculation, or a regulatory formula, or some complex quote for a client, etc. They are problems that are intrinsically complex and that IT can't really productionise by just looking at a couple of formulas, and where having the ability to express the logic in Excel but use it on a server has value.

Chris Granger (of Light Table fame) and his bunch at Eve are working on something like that. There are a bunch of presentations on YouTube. They are more looking at it abstractly as a possible programming / data model, than purely 'compile an Excel sheet to a programming library'.

Eve: https://twitter.com/with_eve Chris Granger: https://twitter.com/ibdknox

That's interesting but I think it addresses a different problem. It seems to be directed at having a more natural and intuitive way to construct and analyse data.

The thing is most business users are already familiar with pivot tables in Excel, for as clunky as they are. But Excel is not only used for data, it is also largely used for a complex business logic. And that's where you have a logic which IT will struggle to understand and therefore should rather not own, and that the business needs to set up and maintain. Think complex tax calculations, or a business plan, or the logic for a quote on a big project, etc. These will be highly non trivial in term of the logic the spreadsheet will follow, and that's where a library that could just reliably swallow a spreadsheet and make it a function IT can use but the business can maintain has a lot of value.

If you're in .NET or Powershell, and Excel is installed on the PC, you already have the Excel libraries. Not to mention the amazing ubiquity of functions to convert, import, manipulate, export, and otherwise work with spreadsheets. Or just work with the functions directly.

Are you refering to Excel's COM interface?

Because Excel is a multi hundred megabyte, incredibly complex piece of software. Way too much trouble if you just want to do simple arithmetic.

Note that this is from early 1996, when Steve Jobs was CEO of NeXT. Apple didn't acquire NeXT until nearly a year later.

I like the comment about the online transactions, not being a technical problem but a business one (in his opinion), a problem that would be solved on that year (1996). And sending card numbers over Internet being safer than doing that over the phone. These days many organizations still ask for those details over the phone, or even on paper.

This is what the Dodge site that appears in that video looks like now: http://www.dodge.com/en/

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