Mastodawn

Just finding out about Lotus Improv, which is exactly the kind of spreadsheet design I've been saying for years we should have, yet it failed to gain any adoption, being fully killed in 1996. Reminds me a bit of Resolver One, which was killed in 2012.
I wish we had a spreadsheet today that leaned heavily into structured data, effectively an interactive UI for SQL tables, but much easy to create and modify. But the consensus seems to be that such a thing dies at the hands of "worse is better".

Now we live in a world where free-form Excel spreadsheets *can* have some structure imposed on them, but that rarely do, instead of one where structure is the default, but with free-form sheets available.

I guess it is the dynamic vs static typing argument all over again, but playing out on a field where people don't necessarily see themselves as programmers.

BTW, spreadsheets with logic are programming. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Spreadsheet software are simultaneously eons ahead of conventional IDEs (fully reactive, live data modification and presentation!) and hopelessly behind (logic and data live in the same place, in an, for all intents and purposes, opaque binary data format).

Owen Nelson Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber did you ever see that talk about how Excel is capital F Functional Programming? It was pretty good.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

Pure Functional Programming in Excel • Felienne Hermans • GOTO 2016

YouTube

Thomas Guyot-Sionnest Nov 19, 2024

@onelson @ekuber Awesome talk! FYI you can even follow @Felienne here! 😀

mpe Nov 19, 2024

@ekuber My favourite take is that Excel is actually a build system - from the Build Systems à la Carte paper.

glyn Nov 19, 2024

@ekuber Are you basing this on the fact that Excel with LAMBDA is Turing-complete? Or would you say Excel enabled programming before LAMBDA was added?

"With the addition of custom functions that can call each other and recursively call themselves, Excel’s formula language becomes Turing-complete, effectively meaning that Excel users can compute anything without resorting to another programming language."

https://www.infoq.com/articles/excel-lambda-turing-complete/

The Excel Formula Language Is Now Turing-Complete

The Excel team announced LAMBDA, a new feature that lets users define and name formula functions. LAMBDA functions admit parameters, can call other LAMBDA functions and recursively call themselves.

InfoQ

@underlap the later. Even without VBscript, Excel can be used for programming.

Hubert Figuière Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber it's a bit like Microsoft Word vs LaTeX.
Wysiwyg hacks vs structured document.
Yes you can structure your Word document and use stylesheets. But you don't have to either.

(applies to LibreOffice an most other consumer grade word processors)

Chris Petrilli Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber worth looking into Mesa as well. That was @dpp baby and had amazing integrations for live data and such. Pretty sure it was all over wall street. Also, like improv, on NeXT

@petrillic @dpp This is a great post that matches my thoughts on the matter: https://blog.goodstuff.im/spreadsheet_thinking_2019
(linked from https://github.com/mesa-x/spreadsheet)

Post: What's the Future of Spreadsheets?

David Pollak Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber @petrillic funny story… I was (briefly) the Principal on honeycode… it coulda changed the world… but for AWS politics… 😱

Tommy Þ Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber I was such a fan and even got the Windows 95 version + update and ran it in a VM for years. Unfortunately it failed. I suspect it's because people aren't structural creators, but more like structural discovers. Just like many languages (hello C) are scrambling to Rust's owership "feature", but aren't going full bore and thus looses much of the benefit, then same way all other spreadsheets adopted ideas from Improv (and called the "pivot tables").

OT: I seem to recall a product that \

Tommy Þ Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber ... expanded on these ideas and dragged them into relational database views. (Found it: quantix.com). As I recall it, the demos were very impressive.

Eric Bender Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber I wrote about Lotus Improv at the time for PC World. Brilliant design but huge learning curve for most people, who pick up spreadsheet grids fairly easily.

Keunwoo Lee Nov 18, 2024

@ekuber "relational DB with a spreadsheet-like UI" has become popular via Airtable grid view & its clones (disclosure: I work there). Hypercubes of cells haven't taken off (hard for users to grasp). Also there's still a gap between relational representations & the flexible, ad hoc modeling/exploration that's routine in spreadsheets, e.g ad hoc sum of arbitrary grid coordinates (one way to do this might be projecting a query result into a region of traditional spreadsheet cells).

@ekuber have you looked at airtable?

@HillClimber I haven't used Airtable, but I had it bucketed in with Tableau, which I feel is a different niche. But I might be wrong.

@ekuber I recommend you take a look. It's basically what you said you're looking for -- a spreadsheet interface to SQL tables.