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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> Isn't this .. the spreadsheet?

As long as by "spreadsheet" you don't mean specifically a 2D grid of cells, but rather a reactive computational graph that just happens to be rendered as 2D grid, in order to not waste so much screen space the way reactive notebooks do :).

OK, the waste thing is not that clear-cut. Spreadsheets give you 2D instead of 1D workflow, but then all spreadsheets I know aren't able to store an array of values in a cell, leading to lots of space waste from every array element taking its own cell.

I hope one day someone will figure out how to merge reactive notebooks (Observable-style, not Jupyter-style) and spreadsheets - both are the same thing underneath, it's just the presentation layer that's different, with complementary pros and cons.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

I'm still not sure why this model didn't win out, aside from entrenched use of other spreadsheets.

MS Excel has largely replicated the Improv model as an optional mode within formulas, allowing you to create Ranges as names for groups of cells and allowing you to use the names as variables in formulas instead of coordinates.

However, it lacks the flexibility of a true dataflow model. They incorporated the full model into the Power Pivot plugin, and later migrated it to a standalone app as Power BI. It's a reasonably complete paradigm, but much less well-known than the spreadsheet.

https://spreadsheeto.com/power-pivot-vs-bi/

I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I might be an idiot, and it might all be obvious in some way, but everything I try to do in excel is about 80% easy and the remaining 20% is hard because a lack of power in excel's formula language. From no-brainers like fixing strings to various things we take for granted elsewhere in programming, like our own defined functions. Sure, if you extend excel, you get some of it, but it should be able to do those things without dropping to VBA or add-ins. Meanwhile, its default functionality leaves a lot to be desired, especially quirks like how it interprets numbers, dates and strings.

I feel like I can explain to someone how to copy and paste things in excel so that formulas get applied, but having to teach them PowerQuery is beyond my ken.

> I'd love to see a sort of hypercube model that also had the ability to perform better database-style summarizing. Pivot tables with more dimensions and power, perhaps.

I'd say the recent data analysis tools based on notebooks and data lakes satisfy those requirements. A library like Pandas provides the cube programming model of data dimensions, a column-oriented database like Hadoop gives you efficient storage, and a Jupyter notebook is the user-friendly GUI.

It's certainly more complex than a spreadsheet, but the code parts may be encapsulated to not scare your users.

> I'm still not sure why this model didn't win out

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30872413

Ah, yeah, that explains why Microsoft has so many tools that seem to have one end that's a claw hammer.

> I hope one day someone will figure out how to merge reactive notebooks (Observable-style, not Jupyter-style) and spreadsheet

I'm working on that exactly - I have several conceptual designs for presentation and interaction, that's where my wit concept comes from as an abstraction to represent cells in the reactive graph, which can be seen either as an array or as a single cell with a label and a prototypic value. Once you liberate the concept from the 2D grid, dependencies between variables create lots of interesting navigation and presentation problems and expanded possibilities.

Unfortunately I don't have much time for side projects and my programming skills are a bit rusty, so I haven't advanced much in terms of actual implementation. Moreover, my 'universal' requirement of having it available as a system-wide background service would take a lot of work :-(

Check out hex’s reactive notebooks

https://hex.tech/blog/hex-two-point-oh/

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