News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Spreadsheet with compute-like functions: GET(), POST(), P... by culi on Thursday January 05, 2023 @02:10PM (#34264897)
Seems like they have sort of a Notion-like approach to spreadsheets

I agree it's pretty cool. What I'd really love to see though is something like Jupyter Notebooks + Spreadsheets. If blocks of code and blocks of spreadsheets could talk to each other, it'd definitely be a killer feature for me

Re:Spreadsheet with compute-like functions: GET(), POST(), P... by mediaman on Thursday January 05, 2023 @02:28PM (#34265165)
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Grist has relationship-driven spreadsheets where the formulas are all Python code. And you can have multiple tables show on the same page, where selection of one filters the others.

The tables are more database-style than pure unstructured Excel sheet style, but I've found that having a full Python environment in each cell to be pretty powerful, and I've started turning to it for analytical work because I can avoid the mess that larger Excel formulas can turn into.

No relationship except as a customer -- they're at getgrist.com

Re:Spreadsheet with compute-like functions: GET(), POST(), P... by patife on Thursday January 05, 2023 @03:30PM (#34266085)
Looks cool too! Python!!
Re:Spreadsheet with compute-like functions: GET(), POST(), P... by dsagal on Thursday January 05, 2023 @03:46PM (#34266305)
Ooh, excited to see mention of Grist (I am a cofounder). Python code and structured data are a great combination, and are particularly good for AI. We did an experiment where AI was quite impressive in writing Python formulas in Grist based on simple prompts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809111

I suppose it's similar to rows.com's ASK_OPENAI("write a spreadsheet formula that..."). Most impressive is that it knows relationships between tables, and can construct correct lookup formulas, and do useful things with their results.

Re:Spreadsheet with compute-like functions: GET(), POST(), P... by breck on Thursday January 05, 2023 @03:37PM (#34266186)
> something like Jupyter Notebooks + Spreadsheets.

We built something like this at Our World in Data (https://pldb.com/languages/explorer.html) and it is still my favorite tool for building charts.

I expect there to be more things like that. Another one I built is https://ohayo.computer/ (but it's due for a refresh).