Hacker News Reader

Comment by creer | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for a "spreadsheet as text files" solution. Something that separates the programming, the data and the visualization. Any pointers?

The main reason is being able to see and edit the programming / formulas as overall text, rather than the usual fragmented cell by fragmented cell view. I love named cells and "ranges". I love the concepts of replicating rows or adding a column to a calculation - that's all good. But programming (or editing data) in the small, cell by cell, just doesn't compute.

"Notebook"-style programming comes close. Ideally, I'd prefer if the visualization was handled independently - freely choosing the embedded capabilities if any, or the mountains of visualization software that already exists.

Improv and Spreadsheet 2000 seem to have gone in that direction - but they are still primarily GUI programs.

View on HN

A while back [this project (grid studio)](https://github.com/ricklamers/gridstudio) looked interesting but I don't think its being maintained.

Shame, as I agree that something like that would solve a lot of problems.

At the moment, excel and spreadsheet solutions as a whole are so different from any actual programming/data work that goes on, that business logic has to be completely rewritten (e.g.) a team of excel based analysts pass something over to developers to integrate into data pipelines.

Would be great if tools kept people at least in the same ballpark.

Quadratic is pretty similar to Grid studio and still being actively developed (https://www.quadratichq.com/)

But re:parent comment, I'm not sure I understand how you could handle the visualization independently

It would not need to be particularly elegant. If the program-spreadsheet exports the right data, it can be rendered or GUI-ed separately - even by a program that watches for export file changes. Even by a spreadsheet viewer for the people who insist.

A notebook lets you use various libraries or outside programs to do the rendering.

If have also done this with graphical objects (think postscript). The program is on one side and generates and composes primitives into useful blocks and arrangements. A - for example - postscript viewer is on the side, watches for updates and re-renders the thing. You now have graphics as programming, with synchronous-enough rendering.

For many years now, I have handled that by writing my own. For the right applications, you can use your favorite programming language and "simply" restrict yourself to working on named cells and cell arrays (instead of all the possible data structures that are normally available.) But - of course - that leaves you having to re-implement spreadsheet features on your own. When it's a long life program, that's still worth it.

CPAN has a few modules in these general directions... Spreadsheet::Engine, Spreadsheet::Perl, Spreadsheet::Edit - some independent, some acting on a spreadsheet file.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com