Tabula Scripta: A spreadsheet for small data-driven apps | Hacker News Reader

Tabula Scripta: A spreadsheet for small data-driven apps

junglecoder.com

66 pointsakkartik20 comments

> The thing is, there isn’t currently, to my knowledge, an actual Access-lite webapp.

AirTable

Odoo Studio: https://www.odoo.com/page/studio

probably meant open source ?

Instead of your own language, I suggest using the Red language. It's similar enough and has a history of being used in RAD/spreadsheet software.

I agree on RAD, but "history of being used in spreadsheet software" is a bit of an overstatement: there are Picosheet showcase [1] and one of the 7GUIs tasks [2] that are made with Red and implement bare-bone native spreadsheets in a handful of code, but that's pretty much it (AFAIK).

And no, Red is a general-purpose language, not specific to spreadsheets like TabulaScript, so your "similar enough" is quite misleading. This reminds of TreeSheets and Lobster [3] though.

[1]: https://www.red-lang.org/2016/07/native-reactive-spreadsheet...

[2]: https://github.com/9214/7guis-red/blob/master/cells.red

[3]: https://github.com/aardappel/treesheets/tree/master/lobster

I discovered Red (and its predecessor Rebol) a few months ago and was really excited about it - very interesting blend of ideas that seems to hit a sweet spot for GUI scripting. Then I discovered it doesn’t have 64-bit support and it seems the community is debating about whether it even should, as it would require a significant overhaul. This makes it a no-go at least for Mac users unfortunately.

Anyone know how likely this is to change [soon]?

> and it seems the community is debating about whether it even should as it would require a significant overhaul

It's true that Red supports 32-bit platforms only, but porting toolchain to 64-bit is a planned transition, which was never "debated about"; Catalina just forced this issue on most developers, including the Red team, and the actual question was if addressing it should come before all the other priorities, to the detriment of overall speed of development and release of major features.

Thanks for clarifying. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage Red at all - the language seems interesting and the project admirable. I’m really eager to dive in and explore, but I’m on Catalina so I can’t yet.

The debate thing was just the impression I came away with. Things like this post[0] from late 2018 saying

> We are currently 32-bit only, and need to decide the best path for adding 64-bit support, should we elect to do so.

(and some other back-and-forth I can’t find at the moment) left me thinking it was an open question. I’m glad to hear it’s on the roadmap.

[0] https://www.red-lang.org/2018/?m=1

IIRC it was said in the context of the next major release (0.6.5), i.e. concentrate on 64-bit support ASAP or instead focus on the planned milestones that were already in the pipes. As you said, there was back-and-worth discussion in community chat, where the team tried to gather some feedback from macOS developers and gain a perspective on how urgent this issue is.

Really unfortunate that you cannot give Red a try, but I think it's still worth checking out in a VM of your choice. Drop by one of the Gitter rooms if you need help to get started:

https://gitter.im/red/red/welcome

I would use google apis for sheets, tasks and keep. Comes with a nice UI out of the box.

Why do most hack the itch projects start from scratch and not use and build on best in class apis?

Should anyone build a product around Google APIs in 2020, given their record here?

What's their record abandoning actually used products? Sheets is literally 13 years old and is heavily used internally and externally. The odds of it going away are very small.

This "Google cancels everything" is pretty much a viewpoint I hear only on HN. I don't know what reality some people are living in.

So you're a Google fanboi. We get it.

They are playing the long game with their GSuite offering. 70% of the USA educational market migrated to Google last 5 years.

When you say educational market do you mean primary/secondary?

The three largest universities in my city recently moved from GSuite to Microsoft’s stack.

Mine moved in the opposite direction last year.

I haven't used it, but isn't this what https://airtable.com/ is for?

Or Coda https://coda.io/welcome

But I think the idea is to learn by coding; for anyone wanting a pretty competent spreadsheet on their web page, I've bookmarked the following for possible use:

  * Mesh Spreadsheet: http://mesh-spreadsheet.com
  * jExcel: https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/v3/

Can you self-host it and keep your data to yourself ?

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