LibreOffice 7.5 update: A great time to jump on this FOSS productivity suite
theregister.com
theregister.com
But the libreoffice community has imho failed to spot an enormous opportunity: properly integrating python as a scripting engine and turning the libreoffice apps into extremely versatile low-code platforms for many people.
What would be a "sweet" way of integrating python more deeply?
Probably many ways and different visions are possible, but here are some ideas:
* be able to discover and install libraries from the interface (think a bit like RStudio / CRAN) into some local dedicated virtualenv
* be able to work with spreadsheets / documents interactively in notebook style, e.g. in a split window that sits side-by-side with the content.
* be able to share spreadsheet and user generated scripts in a simple package
I'm surprised there haven't been more experiments with specialised languages.
I'm further surprised Unix culture hasn't produced any languages for the purpose.
We've got awk and then nothing really until SQL.
It's bizarre to me that we've got this entire programming paradigm and it's basically, well, Basic.
People routinely load and work with spreadsheets in IDE's, or the command line etc. For example Spyder/RStudio/PyCharm etc have some rudimentary means of displaying dataframes. What would be more empowering for many more users is for the spreadsheet application to offer a IDE/REPL type environment. Once the rails for this "extension" have been laid out all sorts of alternative semantics for working with data would be possible.