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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Who's the user for this? It looks too "dumb" for a "real" programmer, and way too "smart" for everyone else. There's no way a real user will be able to navigate that "formula bar".

Source: have observed dozens of regular users through one-way mirror _while at MS_ ~18 years ago. The product later became Dynamics. Users would struggle to find the extremely prominent "OK" button sometimes, or press whichever button was highlighted by default even when they didn't mean to. Anything more complicated than that, it' completely hopeless.

Their own user testing probably shows the same thing, and that's probably why it's open source.

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It's for advanced Excel users, they basically deal with the complexity of programming, just in their strange way, and I think it's a good way to reduce "Excel abuse".

Kind of like “what would you do for the excel abuse case in an environment not tied down by decades of legacy compat?"

That was my first impression (seeing this for the first time today). In an "all built on top of js" world you might just make a snapshot of the entire stack (except for the "browser substitute") part of the document. Make "open new document" essentially the equivalent of github fork from an ever evolving "the empty document" template. You might see quite an impressive reward from moving fast and breaking things instead of sticking to the paradigm of eternal 20th century compatibility.

My wife is a goddess of "Excel abuse". She (a financial analyst) unearths and uses the kinds of features in Excel I didn't know existed. But she can't code and isn't interested in learning how to do so. It's a different mindset entirely. I think MS is blindsided by having so many programmers around that 99% of the people out there aren't anything like engineers in terms of their mindset, let alone programmers. To those folks all this "accessing of properties" might as well be some inscrutable alien language.

It will not replace Frink as my desktop calculator/programming environment for "low-code" stuff especially since no other PL/utility handles unit conversions so effortlessly. I do like the command line/REPL example though. Python units libs, and other PL unit libs take too much typing. I've even made graphic apps with calcs and units for certain jobs. If this Power FX had a well-integrated units library and use, I would consider it.

It is a good question. If you want something more convenient for complex manipulating data than Excel, but don't want to use a 'proper' programming language like Python, then you would probably be better off using a visual data transformation tool - such as our Easy Data Transform.

Certainly not someone who can’t or won’t navigate a UI but maybe a motivated regular user. Usually people who are capable scripters but not professional developers.

yeah, the type of person that would use this would know Python (or JS), in which case they'd want to use that.

I noticed the same thing (technical spreadsheet users) and built Wax[0] to make it easier to build apps on top of Google Sheets.

0 - https://www.wax.run/

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