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Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I don’t think it’s coping.

Spreadsheets are malleable by design. Being able to modify how it functions on the fly is an enormous power for these users. And the better/faster/smarter SaaS replacement is also extremely rigid and inflexible. So while it works to replace the current version of their god spreadsheet, it can’t adjust on the fly as the user’s needs change like the spreadsheet can.

I’m convinced that there does exist a “better spreadsheet” that treats power users as exactly they and incorporates things from the software engineering works like version control, modularity, reusability, sharability, etc. that hasn’t been built yet.

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I’m trying my best to create such a product. What you’re describing is something that (1) amateur spreadsheeters can use, (2) the power users, and (3) programmers, will be able to use and not feel out of their depth or patronized. I personally think that given that Excel is a pure-ish declarative language, then building on a declarative language that programmers use is a solid attack on this, which is why I’ve chosen pure functional programming as a basis for my work. It’s been an enjoyable design process to include or throw out ideas that would alienate either end of the spectrum.

Elsewhere: Making all cells CAS gives you a strong foundation for version control, modularity, resizability and share-ability.

Happy to share more thoughts on this. I’m two years into the process.

Would love to hear more

I realized I left that open ended but I’ll touch on a few points that I think are relevant here;

* There’s a language which is like Haskell/Elm/PureScript in terms of being purely functional and statically typed. But with syntax that looks more like Excel.

* Purity gets us fearless recalculation.

* Static types let us build UI elements automatically based on the inferred types of code.

* It’s content-addressable like Unison. That means every expression and “cell” has a unique SHA512 hash of it which refers to only that expression.

* Content addressability makes cache invalidation of results trivial.

* It also makes it easy to say “I want exactly this version of that person’s cell and for all time.” Makes it impossible to break someone else’s code once it’s working.

* It also lets you fearlessly federate, if ever needed.

* Content addressed also means you can write tests against code and have them run on every change. Only the tests whose dependencies changed will be rerun. That’s not normal in Python or Haskell, but in a spreadsheet it is.

There are other design choices related to your comment but I don’t want to ramble on.

Truly Excel could be improved in a vast number of ways. But would anyone use it? Excel is a kind of product that is perfectly understandable to the average business person.

The more complicated you make it, the more it becomes like real software development. And that is a skill that most people don’t possess.

> The more complicated you make it

Excel is ridiculously complicated. I think you're vastly underestimating the ability of these "average business people" because they don't know how "real software development" works.

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