vgrichina

It's not like Google is some magical unicorn place though. It's boring soul-crushing big corp job with overwhelming politics.

Seeing smartest people waste their time on this was very depressing for me during 3 years spent there.

So I guess this is slower than JavaScriptCore and you have to get commercial license to actually embed it. Why would one choose it at all?

State of the art development workflows fail to utilize possibilities of high-resolution 2d displays (using concepts are rooted in times of plaintext terminals). So I don't see VR coming to programming any time soon.

Hi Evan,

I own small consultancy and am an iOS / OS X developer myself. We are in Ukraine, so 10k / year goes much further here.

We can help you with support, e.g. for percentage of sales. Or we can negotiate other deal. Drop me a line to [email protected], let's discuss the details.

IMO the problem isn't that there are less resources dedicated to open source stuff than to commercial projects. The problem is that there is much less effort and especially polish dedicated to any not user facing aspescts of software. Internal libraries are almost certainly even more half-baked and full of shitty code than most open source projects.

Thanks for great paper, it would definitely help me organise my thoughts as I'm building similar project.

Here is my blog for it – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com

My idea is however to create programming environment from scratch based on the same principles, so that it doesn't have limitations imposed by Excel.

Publicly visible and flexible pricing. Not $10k+ per year as Google Maps API.

For anyone interested in Vim-like editors with Mac UI, I suggest trying Vico – https://github.com/vicoapp/vico

It is completely native, supports TextMate bundles and is scriptable using Lisp dialect.

I think even more important question is "what essential dev tools you've purchased that had some sort of open source equivalent".

As for me, last thing I remember – I've purchased http://theolabrothers.com/sip/ when is wasn't free. And it is just a simple tool I don't require at all (any image editor can be used instead), it is just much more convenient than any other alternative.

To some extent maybe yes, but my main idea isn't to make better spreadsheets.

I want to take direct manipulation of data present in spreadsheets and make it more universal. Something more similar to ideas expressed by Chris Granger – http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/03/27/toward-a-better-prog...

My current plan is to make runtime platform open-source, but sell hosted development tools as SaaS.

While software developers don't usually buy platform stuff like compilers, libraries etc – they are usually more than willing to buy products that make things simple. Otherwise companies like GitHub or (my own product – Hosted CI) won't get any revenue.

Got your point about being less technical. Also I agree that project is currently more about research than building actual product.

(1) There are 2 main pain points: 1) for programmers it is building and debugging systems in non-interactive way; 2) for non-programmers is building contraptions using Excel and bubble gum – see some discussion on that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7363824

(2) Potential market size is around 20 million exiting software developers, based on e.g. this post http://www.quora.com/Ruby-on-Rails-Professionals/Where-can-I... Around 0.05% of that market needs to be captured to have reasonable ROI I guess.

(3) Agree with you. BTW, may you detail what is your background?

Unfortunately I don't have a co-founder yet. Started working on the idea not so long enough.

Got rejected.

My startup is visual programming system ala Spreadsheets + Zapier, here is my YC application – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/...

Would like to hear some feedback on my application.

My startup is visual programming system ala Spreadsheets + Zapier, here is my YC application – http://spreadsheets-on-steroids.tumblr.com/post/82903500034/...

Would like some feedback on my application.

Thats interesting, thanks!

I plan to build something less limited to the traditional spreadsheet UI though. Same concept but more flexible UI, so that for example you may process image data by manipulating pixels as cells.

Doesn't just pressing Cmd+S / Ctrls+S in browser do the job? ;)

But Github is already doing same thing for crypto as it is doing for Git ;) https://github.com/substack/cipherhub

BTW, what were the main difficulties/problems in implementing your project using spreadsheets?

I assume that one of these was having to write Ruby scripts to connect things together instead of working directly with your data sources, was there anything else?

So as I understood you wanted the ability to generate nice-looking report from your data?

So you had to resort to making extremely small cells to allow for precise positioning of elements, correct?