[nokome]

Hey, Stencila developer here. Thanks to the original poster for sharing the link and for all the interest. Unfortunately, the site is not handling all that interest too well (R session hosting instances filling up, timeouts,...). I'm working on it but please bear with me while I try to stabilize things.

[nokome]

Thanks again for the interest. I've launched a few more workers on EC2 for all of you attempting to play with the demo sheet (each of you gets a Docker container running an R session). Things seem to have stabilized for now. A good robustness test - more work needed! Sigh.

[Dwolb]

Hey great work. I like that people are re-thinking spreadsheets as users get more technically inclined to use more sophisticated tools.

What do you think about fixing R notation to not describe cells, but the named array? i.e. instead of Average(A2:B2) it's Average(this_array) where this_array is the name for the row/column data and when the Average cell is clicked, highlight cells A2:B2?

There are many cases around detecting the proper array name or the user not inputing column or row names, but due to the ability to quickly read and understand the code as it relates to the sheet may make certain trade-offs more acceptable (i.e. forcing he user to enter array names).

[nokome]

Thanks for the feedback.

Your suggestion about named arrays is important and relates the discussion here around the approach taken in the OSX Numbers app and the now dead Lotus Improv. Its connected to a planned feature in Stecnila sheets that I call cell "mapping" - effectively projecting an R/Python object onto grid cells. There is some more about that here: https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/118.

Also related is an proposed improvement in how sheet expressions are translated into R code for arrays: https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/157