Show HN: I built a spreadsheet app with Python to make data science easier

Thank you for the kind words. I'll be adding more examples in the future and think of a better way to make them shareable (like Jupyter .ipynb files).

There is another, more fundamental difference between VisiData and spreadsheet apps like this one: being column-oriented (as opposed to cell-oriented). Cell-oriented spreadsheets are great for one-off calculations and creating a visual workflow that fits onto a single sheet, but when you get into larger datasets, you almost always want to work with columns as first-class entities. Individual cells and arbitrary cell ranges are difficult to work with at scale, with data larger than a couple hundred rows.

Also, being cell-oriented makes the spreadsheet not immediately interoperable with other data tools like pandas and R/tidyverse. No single tool will handle all use cases, so it's important to keep the data in its highest-potential form, so that other tools can work their magic without having to reorganize the data first.

So I'm glad that Grid Studio is bringing Python to the web, and I hope they consider going one further and integrating a column-oriented architecture. Otherwise using VisiData or pandas directly will still be your best option for working efficiently with larger datasets.

Good to hear that it's something you want!

I have to say, it's been quite the emotional ride to release this project. Even now I'm constantly embarrassed, it's stupid how bad I feel about so many parts of it (incompleteness, code quality, lack of proper parsing grammar, list continues ad infinitum).

Release early release often they say, that's definitely easier said then done!

It means a lot, thanks!