Mesh Spreadsheet: A data and code editor that feels like a spreadsheet

github.com

86 points·tosh··10 comments

Show HN: Mesh IDE – a code editor that feels like a spreadsheet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14821186 - July 2017 (30 comments)

I'm an experienced developer turned CTO in the finance industry. I've been studying finance and I've come to appreciate spreadsheets a lot. They are much more powerful and interesting than my previous misconception.

I think the biggest weakness of spreadsheets is version control and testing. This really limits the potential for results that are both complex and correct.

There's nothing stopping you from checking your spreadsheets into version control just like any other text-based file format (or non-text-based format, for that matter).

Besides having a snapshot of each change, version control’s big advantage is the ability to compare versions and merge between branches. How do you accomplish that with a spreadsheet?

The same way you do those with any other text-based file format. Just make sure you are committing the raw (unzipped) OOXML and not the .xlsx.

If you like spreadsheets, check out https://rowzero.io.

It looks and feels like Google Sheets and scales to 1B+ row data sets. We natively support Python and Parquet, and connect directly to Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, and S3.

Love this. Truly. I have spent the better part of the past decade thinking about this problem and am also working to address the space between spreadsheet and coding... but sort of the other way around? For non-programmers to do programmy things (particularly data manipulation) in a spreadsheet in a reproducible, robust way

Hum, org-mode tables and org-babel should be inspiring in UI/comfort terms...

Seems like Rows.com is already in this space? or do I misunderstand?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com