[nerdponx]

Theoretically these are all problems with Excel, not with spreadsheets in general.

Also Excel does support circular references; I once worked for a guy who used them to iteratively fit a model!

I'm waiting for "the programmer's spreadsheet" where you have functions, clean separation of "data" and "display", proper types, and some kind of sensible version control.

[chrisdone]

I am working on a product which is pretty much exactly what you describe. I love spreadsheets but I wanted something that I wanted to actually program in right from the beginning to the end of my work process.

It’s called Inflex: https://inflex.io/

And it is a pure functional programming language, with cells, which are reactive, and with real data structures like lists and records. We have a work in progress beta. Sign up requires a paid subscription, but only because I wanted to make sure that the infrastructure was working. To try the work in progress product, you can just hit Try which lets you play in a sandbox. It doesn’t save or remember any of your work, and also doesn’t even hit our databases. (Safe from the hug of death.)

It’s pretty bare-bones right now but it’s based on ideas from Haskell, and Unison which is a content addressable language. (Every cell has a SHA512 hash of its content.) That makes versioning very easy, but this is not seen in the UI yet.

The table editing and what not is a little cumbersome right now, as there are a lot of things to come together and I wanted to demonstrate at least some of them.

Speaking of clean separation between data and display, The plan is to build for example reports using a simple HTML like DSL. Also, things like time and external data sources will be treated in the type system as explicit streams, which is an architecture that has been fully explored in Haskell under the guise of FRP.

But I’m working on this in my spare time and therefore progress is turtle pace rather than silicon valley pace. :)

[IggleSniggle]

Maybe something like Observable (the product not the pattern) + TypeScript?

I’ve been thinking recently that TypeScript, when considered by itself (ie, just the type system), is quickly becoming a kind of flexible type database around a very loose language.

You can force TypeScript to figure things like:

type One = 1; type Two = 2; type addOneAndTwo = One + Two;

But its very brittle and difficult to accomplish, especially if you wish to couple this back to the runtime values.

If these ever become language features, I can see this powering the thing you’re describing: a capability that gives you flexible loose JavaScript for the non-programmers that can also be iteratively tightened, possibly with a reactive view fronting all of it.

[bnj]

I couldn't agree more with the notion of "the programmer's spreadsheet"; I've often wondered what it would take to get something like R/Python notebooks up and running with some more spreadsheet features.