nexo VS Pluto.jl

> It would be great to hear from the HN community about ways to improve spreadsheets.

I’m working on this! Early days so far, and I have nothing much to show for it yet, but I have some ideas on integrating static type inference and proper data structures into spreadsheets. My initial prototype is at [0]: it’s horrifically buggy in just about every way (don’t even try to get it working!), but the screenshot should give some idea of what I’m thinking should be possible.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/nexo

There’s Inflex [0], which has a very interesting (and I think better) approach to spreadsheets. I’ve also been working independently on a similar idea [1], though it’s early days yet and I’m still busy figuring out the how to build it in a principled way. The Inflex website also has a really nice bibliography [2] with a fairly complete catalogue of what else has been done in this space.

[0] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex/

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/nexo

[2] https://chrisdone.com/posts/inflex-bibliography/

I thought that notebook based development and package based development were diametrically opposed in the past, but Pluto.jl notebooks have changed my mind about this.

A Pluto.jl notebook is a human readable Julia source file. The Pluto.jl package is itself developed via Pluto.jl notebooks.

https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

Also, the VSCode Julia plugin tooling has really expanded in functionality and usability for me in the past year. The integrated debugging took some work to setup, but is fast enough to drop into a local frame.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/julia

Julia is the first language I have achieved full life cycle integration between exploratory code to sharable package. It even runs quite well on my Android. 2023 is the first year I was able to solve a differential equation or render a 3D surface from a calculated mesh with the hardware in my pocket.

Re Julia there is also pluto.jl that is another notebook-like environment for julia. It's been a few years since I played with it but it looked cool, for example it handles state differently so you don't get into the same messes as with ipython notebooks. https://plutojl.org/

For this, Notebooks are often used. Julia offers a uniquely nice and interactive Pluto notebook for the web https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl

I believe this is what Pluto sets out to do for Julia.

I used it as part of the “Computational Thinking” with Julia course a year or two back. Even then the beta software was very good and some of the demos the Pluto dev showed were nothing short of amazing

https://plutojl.org/

I think what you want is Pluto!

I like how Pluto.jl handles this:

> Pluto offers an environment where changed code takes effect instantly and where deleted code leaves no trace. Unlike Jupyter or Matlab, there is no mutable workspace, but rather, an important guarantee:

> At any instant, the program state is completely described by the code you see.

[1] https://github.com/fonsp/Pluto.jl