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> self-rendered cells, processed in place as collections of data sharing the same structure

Isn't this .. the spreadsheet? I was entertained watching this drift towards a set of cells in a grid some of which contain formulae and some of which contain data, used for accounting purposes, and wondering when the lightbulb was going to come on.

(Funnily enough I've written my own transaction-annotating system lately. It's in python and stores the data in CSV, having got it from the Nordigen bank interface. EEA programmers may find Nordigen extremely useful: https://nordigen.com/en/coverage/)

> Isn't this .. the spreadsheet?

As long as by "spreadsheet" you don't mean specifically a 2D grid of cells, but rather a reactive computational graph that just happens to be rendered as 2D grid, in order to not waste so much screen space the way reactive notebooks do :).

OK, the waste thing is not that clear-cut. Spreadsheets give you 2D instead of 1D workflow, but then all spreadsheets I know aren't able to store an array of values in a cell, leading to lots of space waste from every array element taking its own cell.

I hope one day someone will figure out how to merge reactive notebooks (Observable-style, not Jupyter-style) and spreadsheets - both are the same thing underneath, it's just the presentation layer that's different, with complementary pros and cons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

I'm still not sure why this model didn't win out, aside from entrenched use of other spreadsheets.

> I'm still not sure why this model didn't win out

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872413

Ah, yeah, that explains why Microsoft has so many tools that seem to have one end that's a claw hammer.

MS Excel has largely replicated the Improv model as an optional mode within formulas, allowing you to create Ranges as names for groups of cells and allowing you to use the names as variables in formulas instead of coordinates.

However, it lacks the flexibility of a true dataflow model. They incorporated the full model into the Power Pivot plugin, and later migrated it to a standalone app as Power BI. It's a reasonably complete paradigm, but much less well-known than the spreadsheet.

https://spreadsheeto.com/power-pivot-vs-bi/

I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I might be an idiot, and it might all be obvious in some way, but everything I try to do in excel is about 80% easy and the remaining 20% is hard because a lack of power in excel's formula language. From no-brainers like fixing strings to various things we take for granted elsewhere in programming, like our own defined functions. Sure, if you extend excel, you get some of it, but it should be able to do those things without dropping to VBA or add-ins. Meanwhile, its default functionality leaves a lot to be desired, especially quirks like how it interprets numbers, dates and strings.

I feel like I can explain to someone how to copy and paste things in excel so that formulas get applied, but having to teach them PowerQuery is beyond my ken.

> I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I'd say the recent data analysis tools based on notebooks and data lakes satisfy those requirements. A library like Pandas provides the cube programming model of data dimensions, a column-oriented database like Hadoop gives you efficient storage, and a Jupyter notebook is the user-friendly GUI.

It's certainly more complex than a spreadsheet, but the code parts may be encapsulated to not scare your users.

> I hope one day someone will figure out how to merge reactive notebooks (Observable-style, not Jupyter-style) and spreadsheet

I'm working on that exactly - I have several conceptual designs for presentation and interaction, that's where my wit concept comes from as an abstraction to represent cells in the reactive graph, which can be seen either as an array or as a single cell with a label and a prototypic value. Once you liberate the concept from the 2D grid, dependencies between variables create lots of interesting navigation and presentation problems and expanded possibilities.

Unfortunately I don't have much time for side projects and my programming skills are a bit rusty, so I haven't advanced much in terms of actual implementation. Moreover, my 'universal' requirement of having it available as a system-wide background service would take a lot of work :-(

Check out hex’s reactive notebooks

https://hex.tech/blog/hex-two-point-oh/

> Isn't this .. the spreadsheet?

You nailed it, it's a spreadsheet - but one that doesn't constraint all data to live on the same application window, but could access and transform it throughout the whole system - just like copy/paste can transfer data from one program to another, where it can be transformed with a different toolset.

Copy/paste is the most fundamental tool in the toolbox of the end user, since it's the only universal* way to transfer data between apps without accessing an API programmatically, so I think it's undeservedly neglected as a tool to build real life practical workflows.

Incidentally, spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and successful End-User Development tools, allowing users to build information systems tailored to their business purposes. A system combining those design capabilities with the flexibility of building system-wide workflows could transcend the current model of siloed apps.

* Intents on mobile devices are similar, but they are not universal - many times the app to which you want to transfer data is not recognized as a valid target for the shared data.

The Unix pipe seems like scriptable copy & paste.

It's not, because you can't easily spawn transient pipes between running processes. The OS probably allows this, but I've never seen it exposed in the UI layer.

Pipes are primarily used to build ad-hoc pipelines that run in batch mode. Copy&paste is a tool for moving specific bits of data on demand between two running programs, or within the same program. Copy&paste interaction model is "please take this and put it there", and the ability to select the this and the there is just as important as transferring the data itself.

> can't easily spawn transient pipes between running processes.

Yeah, while this is theoretically possible it's unmanageable in practice (the "washing line" protocol allows you to send a UNIX pipe file descriptor to another process over a socket).

I suspect the nearest thing that made it into production was OLE.

I'd say the closest thing in modern systems would be the Stream metaphor (a.k.a. Observer design pattern) in functional reactive programming.

This is the construct used to program the spreadsheet's reactive behavior, after all. You could think of users creating spreadsheet formulas as declaring a pipeline at runtime between two datasets, the origin range and the target range.

What is missing is a way to create "spreadsheet functions" among different applications. Online computational notebooks a la Jupyter are almost there, but they still need to share the same runtime kernel to transfer data between different books.

A combination of notebooks and web hooks should do the trick, methinks, but it needs someone to assemble this brittle system into a robust product.

Maybe by manipulating /proc/12345/fd/* ? Can these be manipulated or are they read-only?

it's one of the next thing in computing IMO

Possibly related: "Seme, the smallest unit of meaning recognized in semantics". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seme_(semantics)

Thanks, I'll take a look. A wit would be the smallest unit of meaning in computing, then. I.e. the smallest part that needs processing beyond that of a primitive.

I forgot to mention that I like your idea. And yeah, semantics and computing are related in a complex way, but certainly are not the same thing.

I was distracted, trying to think of where I'd seen something like that in science fiction, and now I think (but can't check right now) that Robert Heinlein's novelette "Gulf" had something about the smallest unit of thought; the "psychon" or some such.

There may also have been something in Keith Laumer's "The Great Time Machine Hoax", but I'm less sure about that.

I should point out that I'm not entirely serious about the concept of wit really being any measurable amount of meaning, I just wanted a catchy name that sounds cool :-)

The true minimum meaningful computation is probably the lambda function, anyway.

Certainly lambda is Turing equivalent, so sure. Seems like you could say the same for other things that are Turing equivalent, OTOH. Lukasiewicz logic [1] ; MOV [2] ; Semi-Thue string rewriting [3], and so on.

But since such things usually suffer from the Turing Tarpit [4], perhaps there's one that has some kind of minimax to be ideally terse and require ideally-few steps for its Turing equivalency, similar to the way that radix 3 (closest to e) has been claimed to have been proven to be the ideally efficient representation system. [5]

(I say "claimed" simply because I recently saw a claim that there's a loophole in the usual reasoning.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81ukasiewicz_logic#Real-val...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-instruction_set_computer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy

If I had a penny everytime a system's book/teacher said "systems are like living cells, they have interaction to themselves and the medium"...

Because it's a valid metaphor :-)

Computation started at the Jacquard loom, so engineers have a tradition of seeing it as a machine crunching patterns.

But computers science, just like math, is a language so its deeply grounded in semantics. And semantics grow and evolve from the actions of each individual speaker, without a central processing unit controlling the process, so "organic" is a good way to describe it.

...You've been listening to Alan Kay? STEPS: https://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

VPRI implemented this dataflow GUI concept along with many other concepts in a minimal OS. Maru underpins the GUI stuff, and is highly flexible in itself.

> ...You've been listening to Alan Kay?

Actually yes :-) I agree that the original vision of computing pioneers about "augmenting the human intellect" has yet to become reality, and the industry has been entrenched in a local minimum derived from the very early engineering practices. But all that is finally changing really fast.