[PRL] The Importance of Excel

Tony Garnock-Jones tonyg at ccs.neu.edu
Thu Feb 14 10:58:31 EST 2013


On 02/14/2013 09:20 AM, Mitchell Wand wrote:
> Yes, I know we've done type-checking for Excel.  What else might we be
> able to do to help?  (See the HN discussion for a discussion of the real
> difficulties).

 From the article and the comments, it sounds like (distributed) version 
control (and some kind of audit trail) is a crucial missing piece.

Flexible sharing and access control of raw and processed data is 
another. (Revokable, attenuable, delegable object capabilities help here.)

Integrated documentability is another (despite the increased 
literate-programming style potential of having 2D layout available!).

All of these are development environment (i.e. operating system) 
concerns. It surprises me, but I don't see a lot of work in these areas 
from the PL community.

 From a PL-in-the-small point of view, perhaps the quickest win would be 
replacing row/column addressing entirely.

Which immediately leads me back to development environments: wouldn't it 
be interesting to get a spreadsheet-like UI template constructed 
(semi)automatically from a Data Definition? Smalltalk's 
"inspectors"/"explorers" and their successors approach this, but haven't 
taken the step of integrating spreadsheet-like abilities on top of the 
presentation of the domain objects.

Tony



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