A bit of personal background of the talk: my work over the years has involved making internal tools for fast-moving, small organizations and that's how I fell in love with spreadsheets. They are the best canvas I know of to whip up custom, user-friendly interfaces in a couple of hours. These prototypes often then go on to be intensely used for months and even years with organic growth & minimal maintenance.
Spreadsheets are often seen with condescension by technical people & they've grown a heavy patina of drudgery over the decades. But to me they represent creative freedom & the easiest interface to computation we've yet found, so successful it's nearly invisible. I gave this talk because I'm starting to find answers to what makes them so successful and have ideas of how they might evolve.
My key points in the talk:
* Spreadsheets matter. Used by billions of people, they're the main way to go beyond being a point-and-click user and start programming. I frame spreadsheets as level 2 in a scale for interfaces that Gordon Brander imagines in this essay: https://subconscious.substack.com/p/a-kardashev-scale-for-in...
* Spreadsheets are changing. In 2022 Excel & Google Sheet got lambdas and reached level 3 in Brander's scale. The talk is a stab at what a level-4 spreadsheet might be, how you could translate QUOTE & EVAL into spreadsheets.
* Spreadsheets have an essence, what Alan Kay described as "the value rule" back in 1984: a cell can read from any other but can only write to itself. This is the founding, simplifying constraint of spreadsheets, akin to how structured programming outlawed go-to’s in code.
* Spreadsheets are time-less. The consequence of the value rule is that there is no time in spreadsheets. There are no unfolding sequences or loops or conditionals, execution happens in a subjective instant after a user change and only then.
* Spreadsheets are easy because they're time-less & space-full. They do without the trickiest part of computation (invisible unfolding time) and include a native, idealized space, the biggest aid to computation we’ve found: an interactive grid you embody & reference through cells. As opposed to ”normal" control-flow programming that goes wild with time & has abstract data structures for space.
* Homoiconicity can be practical! When translated to spreadsheets, homoiconicity looks very related to copy-paste, links, transclusion & component/instances.
To sum up: Spreadsheets are old but they've never been "finished", they've keept evolving and they merit a new look.