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The Economist stylized this as “tweets are appraised as speech, but punished as writing.”

I mean if the value is imported as a decimal, then a sort by that field will sort as decimal. This might not be obvious if a system imports 23.53, 53.98 etc - a user would think it looks good. It only becomes clear that it was an error to import as a decimal when we consider cases like “00.10”. E.g, package versions: 10.10 is a newer version than 10.1.

Types only help if you pick the right ones.

That’s a shrewd observation. Static types help with this somewhat. E.g. in Inflex, if I import some CSV and the string “00.10” as 0.1, then later when you try to do work on it like

x == “00.10”

You’ll get a type error that x is a decimal and the string literal is a string. So then you know you have to reimport it in the right way. So the type system told you that an assumption was violated.

This won’t always happen, though. E.g. sort by this field will happily do a decimal sort instead of the string 00.10.

The best approach is to ask the user at import time “here is my guess, feel free to correct me”. Excel/Inflex have this opportunity, but YAML doesn’t.

That is, aside from explicit schemas. Mostly, we don’t have a schema.

I think you shouldn’t try to replace a spreadsheet with yet another spreadsheet that just has one extra feature. Many, many start-ups have done that. They make some money, but it’s not really anything new.

In your case an add-on makes sense.

I see that it supports units in terms of scale - does it also prevent units that measure different things from being combined? E.g. 2 kg + 3cm (units mismatch) or 3$ * 7$ (two monies can’t be multiplied).

Airtable is strongly typed in the fields of the tables, but the expression language is not. It is my conclusion based on researching Airtable, that the decision to have well typed tables is so that relational operations work nicely, and so that they can implement interfaces on top of these tables easily, such as calendars and work planning things etc. I don’t think that there is an underlying motivation to fix the ill-type code of the world, so to speak. Any non-trivial code work is done in JavaScript, anyway.

I commented elsewhere in this submission that I am working on a strongly typed spreadsheet. (Don’t want to spam my product link.)

I do think that bringing new syntax to the table is justifiable if it brings new concepts with it.

I agree, power query is essentially a separate product and doesn’t feel first class. I think that probably explains its relative obscurity, despite being highly powerful.

I like your work on Mito, and I feel like it’s the python answer to a project that I’m working on which is the equivalent but with Haskell, or rather a riff on Haskell to be more amenable to spreadsheets-like programming.

One thing that you can do when you have a pure functional programming language is rather than generating separate cells for modifications, you can go into the code and modify it directly fairly reliably.

I’ve linked my project elsewhere, don’t want to spam the thread.

SPJ has been coming at this from the angle of let’s add things to Excel because Excel itself is already established.

This, in my opinion, is putting lipstick on a pig. The inputs and outputs work represents a very stretched contortion of trying to do real programming in a limited environment.

I am coming at it (commented elsewhere in the submission my project, avoiding spam) from the other end: start with a fresh, language take all the tried and tested programming language research useful to this way of working and connect it to a UI which fully comprehends this language. Throw out the grid and coordinates.

Row types, polymorphic variants, FRP for time/streams/events, type classes for arithmetic, CAS for cells, etc. We really do know what works, and therefore we can actually start from scratch and have some thing that is actually nice to use.

It’s my understanding that the main selling feature of AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars, kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets you implement those fairly reliably.