Pavel Bazant Projectional Spreadsheet Demo

5/21/19

Notes

• thanks to Aria Minaei for the intro & Dan Cook for inviting Pavel to the Future of Coding Slack
• excel but not based on a grid but general graph-like structure
• 60% is a spreadsheet: structured document with formulas
• building a tool for physicists
  • who should use something like spreadsheet
  • but instead use python for power
• removing the limitations of excel that prevent me from using it to analyze data
• hierarchical cell model
• direct manipulation keyboard and mouse for adding and deleting cells
• position of the cursor (and other data) is “reified” in document (reactive values)
• can hide or show fomulas
• escape hatch to svg (but maybe one day will make it inspectable)
• true/false boolean that changes on clicking on it
• trying to see how far he can go with this model
• design principle: never use text for anything, no parsing at all
• can we see you create a formula?
  • press = makes null formula
  • strings evaluate to themselves
  • lisp-like structured editor
• what’s up with the colored blocks?
  • they are references to specific cells
  • kinda a cool idea instead of hazel’s numbered holes (but you can also give string names)
• jupyter notebook is far from excel because the kernal is a ball of hidden state
  • oberserablehq is the direct solution to this
• first-class links
  • wormhole to original thing
• two most important things
  • everything has a uuid
  • links are stable when things are moved around or renamed
• difference between structural and projectional editing: whether its rich data underneath or just a way to write text without syntax errors
• he didn’t show macros or formula networks
  • the system can create fragments of itself, including formulas that create formulas

Questions

• do you have a series of benchmarks that will keep pushing forward your development?
• is the goal of the project that real physicists use it? compete with jupyter notebook and python?
• how are you planning to solve all the imperative things (IO Monad?)
• what will the architecture be for FRP for large, complex apps, particularly with modularity in mind?
  • can buttons or other elements emit scoped data about themselves?
  • answer: going with a global approach, and have things be self-healing
    • you can also refer to things relatively in the tree hierarchy
• how are you planning on having users learning the keyboard commands?

Things it reminds me of

• flowsheets
• pane
• lamdu, isomorf, luna lang
• forms/3
• some eve prototypes
• observablehq
• original conal stuff is frp but also about the physics problem of a bouncing ball
• first-class links reminds me of JE’s managed copy and paste
• mariano guerra’s Instadeq
• https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax