[narush]

Hey everyone. Mito cofounder here. Thanks to whoever posted this - was a real surprise to find it here :-)

Mito (pronounced my-toe) was born out of our personal experience with spreadsheets, and a previous (failed) spreadsheet version control product.

Spreadsheets were the original killer app for computers, and are the most popular programming language used worldwide today. That being said, spreadsheets have some growing to do! They don’t handle large datasets well, they don’t lead to repeatable or auditable processes, and generally they disrespect many of the hard won software engineering principals that us engineers fight for.

More than that, as spreadsheet users run into these problems and turn to Python to solve them, they struggle to use pandas to accomplish what would have been two clicks in a spreadsheet. Pandas is great, but the syntax is not always so obvious (not is learning to program in the first place!)

Mito is the our first step in addressing these problems. Take any dataframe, edit it like a spreadsheet, and generate code that corresponds to those edits. You can then take this Python code and use it in other scripts, send it to your colleagues, or just rerun it.

We’ve been working on Mito for over a year now. Growth has really picked up in the past few months - and we’ve begun working with larger companies to help accelerate their transition to Python.

To any companies who are somewhere in that Python transition process - please do reach out - we would love to see if we can be helpful for all your spreadsheet users!

Feel free to browse my profile for other spreadsheet related thoughts, I’m a bit of a HN junkie. Of course, any and all feedback (positive or negative) is appreciated.

My cofounders and I will be trolling about in the comments. Say hey! :-)

[aarondia]

Heyo! Another co-founder here. Excited to see Mito on HN :) Thanks @alefnula for posting!

+1 to everything @narush said.

It's important to us that the software we build is empowering to users and not restrictive. This plays out in two primary ways: 1) Since Mito is open source and generates Python code for every edit, Mito doesn't lock users into a 'Mito ecosystem', instead it help users interact with the powerful & robust Python ecosystem. 2) Because Mito is an extension to Jupyter Notebooks + JupyterLab, Mito improves your existing workflows instead of completely altering your data analytics stack.

Excited to interact with you all in the comments :)

[kite_and_code]

Can you please clarify what you mean by "mito is open-source"?

Last time I checked the code was under a proprietary license.

Edit: I found in another comment below that mito is now available under GPL license here: https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo/blob/dev/LICENSE

Edit2: Just saw your answer now - thanks for the clarification and links!

[aarondia]

Mito is licensed [1] under the AGPL liscence. The TLDR of the license is that you can use, distribute, and modify Mito for free, but any modifications that you make need to be shared back with the Mito community.

There is an additional version of Mito, Mito Pro, that is licensed under a different license that provides access to advanced functionality only if you are paying for a Mito Pro / Enterprise subscription.

[1] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo/blob/dev/LICENSE [2] https://github.com/mito-ds/monorepo/blob/dev/mitosheet/src/p...

[teruakohatu]

Does AGPL mean it can only be used in a notebook for which the notebook itself is open source?

Or does it mean it can only be used with notebook software (eg. Jupyter) that is open source but in a closed source notebook?

[kite_and_code]

If you are a large company trying to migrate to Python, you might also want to have a look at bamboolib.com which was acquired by Databricks.

bamboolib is very similar to mito (hard to tell who was first).

The advantage is that it runs within Databricks which gives you the ability to scale to any amount of data easily and Databricks has many (and growing) security certifications e.g. HIPAA compliance.

bamboolib can be used in plain Jupyter. Also, bamboolib private preview within Databricks is about to start within the next days.

Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of bamboolib and employed by Databricks

[NoImmatureAdHom]

bamboolib appears to be closed-source. You're at their mercy.

[kite_and_code]

bamboolib co-founder here:

It's correct that bamboolib is (still) closed-source (which might be subject to change but I don't make promises).

It's also correct that customers can extend the bamboolib UI in various ways via plugins that they can author themselves. That empowers them to build bamboolib into the kind of tool that they want.

Also, all the code is always exported and thus, there is at least no "code lockin".

Regarding being "at their mercy", I can say that there are many customers who are happy by the service that we provide.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I'm sure you have good intentions, but the fact of the matter is the company may be acquired or the people replaced, and those intentions might change.

IMHO investing in a closed-source product like bamboolib as a tool for an important business function is very risky. Imagine you're a small company, and you start using bamboolib for some part of your data analysis pipeline. Bamboolib gets acquired (you have exited kite_and_code, congratulations), and the now very large company that controls it decides to stop supporting some feature critical to what you're doing, make an addition that messes everything up, go full-on SaaS somehow, or just shut the product down. What now? You've been growing, so you've got a small team of junior non-experts who were getting the hang of it...switching will be painful (or you could lock yourself in that walled garden and pay the SaaS price...).

[kite_and_code]

Fair points.

I guess in this specific case at hand, companies can switch between bamboolib, mito, dtale and it is less likely that all of them will become unavailable at the same time. The switch is also not so hard because there are no underlying proprietary file formats involved (except for bamboolib plugins) because the generated code is pandas, plotly, etc.

Similarly as described below/above: counter-intuitively, the availability of open-source LibreCalc makes it easier and safer to adopt closed-source Excel.

[nojito]

Excel is closed source and it powers the world.

[wanderingmind]

If MS shuts down, there are better FOSS tools that can process excel files (Librecalc), or in general the entire office ecosystem. Can't say the same for small startups.

[kurupt213]

This is a flawed way of looking at things.

[lcrmorin]

Hey a bit late to the party (HN newsletter crowd). This really seems like something my BigCorp could use. I am on holiday RN, so I won't fire my computer to try it. But I was wondering, does it allows easy copy pasting the table into standard MS documents (work ? outlook mails ?).