Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and columns to custom apps

Re:Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and col... by adrianratnapala on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @12:51AM (#15547563)

Yet there is an enormous amount of important money-work being done by Excel users who are far more advanced than me, building what are essentially computer programs / databases.

So even if that market has fewer users then Excel itself, there an still be money to be made from people who could use a tool that is better behaved than a consumer spreadsheet but easier to use (for domain specialists) than a general programming environment.

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Re:Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and col... by eropple on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @01:05AM (#15547633)

This is the argument that (IMO, rightly) people make against the continued use of C for systems programming.

But C aficionados insist they understand its behaviors well enough to not get bitten...

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Re:Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and col... by adrianratnapala on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @06:44AM (#15548977)

I accept the analogy here between Excel and C, but I think the moral is the opposite.

Excel is very likely a good choice for a lot of people doing complicated stuff with it -- in spite of its problems. It's just that some of those people might also want a niche product that replaces it for some particular purpose. Not an entirely new, general purpose tool.

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Re:Coda, a “next-generation spreadsheet” – from rows and col... by kamaal on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @07:13AM (#15549109)

The problem with using a tool with say 5% of the features excel provides is you sooner or later run into some feature you need, but is absent in the niche tool. You can't exactly split your work between two tools now. So it just makes sense to use the tool with the super set of all the features, even if you don't use all those features all the time.

The right comparison for this would be using some thing like awk/sed compared to using Perl.

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