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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat random, but spreadsheets continued to evolve after VisiCalc (obviously).

Here is one by the inventor of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin, on github: https://github.com/DanBricklin/socialcalc

Audrey Tang (who happens to currently serve as the Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of China (Taiwan)) created the Node.js port of SocialCalc, EtherCalc: https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc

Audrey made a fascinating write up of SocialCalc for The Architecture of Open Source Applications https://aosabook.org/en/v1/socialcalc.html

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Audrey Tang also wrote a simpler spreadsheet for another AOSA book: https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html

These books are such a gold mine yet I constantly feel like it's hard to motivate myself to buy one and properly read it through. Suggestions?

Start with the 500 lines one, and read the first half of one chapter.

I've never used it, Lotus Improv seems like it was awesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgGmKD87U3M (plus the 80s–90s vibes of this video are simply incredible)

I think there's still a ton of room for spreadsheet tech to evolve, but nobody seems to really be trying anymore, because Excel is the Gold Standard that everyone seems comfortable with.

for example: why do neither of the mainstream spreadsheet apps (Excel, Google Sheets) have first-class support for row and column headers? seems like an absolute no-brainer to me, and everyone who has worked in spreadsheets for more than thirty minutes.

An improv video, thanks for the link. I only have the contemporary magazines with analysis of it.

> first-class support for row and column headers

Excel provides Tables for that. Outside tables, you can define named row or column ranges, and reference them by name, including their intersections. The names are just not displayed in the headers (use Tables if you want that).

emphasis on "first-class"

Tables have first-class row and column headers, I would say.

I'm arguing tables being contained within sheets effectively make column/row referencing "second-class".

Improv was interesting — and then there was Wingz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix_Wingz), another very forward-thinking SS from the early days. I'd love to see a history & comparison of early SS/WP/DB applications in order to see what ideas were tried & left behind because they were too outside the norm for the day or required too many resources which could be reclaimed & worked into today's software.

Couldn't agree more. It's absolutely a no brainer. I'm actually building an app to try to bring first-class support for row and column headers (and much more)

Numbers has some good incremental improvements. It does have first-class support for headers, and even uses them for references which makes things absurdly clear in comparison to the plain A1 format. Multiple tables per sheet is also particularly great IMO.

The web version was mostly replete last I used it half a decade ago, including realtime collaboration with mac and iOS.

Cool that Dan Bricklin still writes software, open source no less.

The other name's familiar too. (Looked it up) Audrey Tang also started Pugs which prototyped Perl6 in Haskell while it was being designed.

Given by just the github account, his last activity was 13 years ago; his personal website last had a post in 2018 though (http://www.bricklin.com/default.htm). He / his company made some iOS apps as well.

>open source no less.

Dual license CPAL + Artistic.

They are both OSI approved, but uncommon.

Sadly their license is terrible.

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