would something like dbsp support spreadsheet style computations? Most of the financial world is stuck behind spreadsheets and the entire process of productioinizing spreadsheets is broken:
* Engineers don't have time to understand the spreadsheet logic and translate everything into an incremental version for production.
* Analysts don't understand the challenges with stream processing.
* SQL is still too awkward of a language for finance.
* Excel is a batch environment, which makes it hard to codify it as a streaming calculation.
If I understand correctly, your paper implies as long as there is a way to describe spreadsheets as a Zset, some incremental version of the program can be derived? Spreadsheets are pretty close to a relational table, but it would be a ZSet algebra on cells, not rows, similar to functional reactive programming. So dbsp on cells would be incremental UDFs, not just UDAFs?
thoughts??