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Comment by gpjt | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2005, some friends and I started a company called Resolver Systems to build a Python-enabled spreadsheet, which we called Resolver One. Sadly, it never took off in the marketplace, and we had to pivot; we would up creating PythonAnywhere, an online coding and hosting environment, which worked out pretty well and was acquired by Anaconda last year. And now, the circle is closed :-)

(Just for clarity: the team working on this inside Anaconda is entirely separate from the PythonAnywhere team. It would have made a perfect Hollywood-ready story if it had been the same people...)

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It was a great product - I remember your pitch and indeed we met a few times at the London python for finance meetup (remember the "Enthought Python Distribution"?). The only issue is that Resolver was IronPython-based so there were a bunch of libs that kinda didn't work.

I have to second that, it seemed to be a great tool. I've often wondered why it couldn't get traction¹. I can recall people gushing about it at what may have been the same Python meetup in London, and also people being impressed enough by it at a Haskell meetup that they were lamenting an imagined lost opportunity to shove a "real language" in to a spreadsheet ;)

I'd always kind of assumed that the target audience would have appreciated the IronPython use, as the .net ecosystem would likely have been more valuable to them. Having just looked I see that numpy wasn't available on IronPython until 2010, and I'm sure that would have been useful to have a little earlier.

¹ Pretty sure I've referenced it here a few times too.

Right, the lack of support for C extensions in IronPython was a problem; we kicked off the IronClad project [1] to fix that -- looks like someone else picked it up later and updated it for Python 2.7 [2]. Not sure where it went after that, or whether MS fixed the underlying issue later on.

[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/ironclad/ [2] https://github.com/IronLanguages/ironclad

I built my first app on PythonAnywhere! I've had stuff running on there for almost a decade now. I loved being able to make small tweaks to the app directly in the PythonAnywhere web app. Such a great product. Really missed stuff like that when I started using GCP/AWS.

That's awesome, glad you like it :-D

PythonAnywhere is awesome :) like the other commenter it was my first foray into web programming too!

Resolver Systems came to my mind right away when I heard this news.

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