that’s why https://omasheet.org has its own DSL. that said it’s no doubt go some wrinkles so I’ll be reviewing all the comments on this hn post very carefully

Not entirely uninteresting, wrote some thoughts in your main comment thread.

"classic Spreadsheet functionality" is just familiar Excel functions with uppercase names implemented in Python, right here: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/tree/main/sandbox/gr...

E.g. UPPER($A) is just a function that calls $A.upper(). And $A is just syntactic sugar over rec.A.

PREVIOUS() is only special in that it automatically creates an index, which is important for efficiency. But generally you can look up a set of records and write multi-line Python code to do whatever you want with it and return a value. And it all runs in a sandbox with no access to anything except this document's data.

Oh, so this is something Grist specific rather than something inherited from Excel? (I remember reading sometime back that MS was replacing VBA with Python)