For some time now (link I’ve been fascinated with the potential of spreadsheets cells as the building blocks of programs. They could open General Purpose Computing to the next 1 billion application builders.
Spreadsheets have outgrown their humble beginnings. They started as an accounting tool. Now they power just about any task and department:
Why? Because they are very simple to use (link):
min
, max
, etc.This makes them great to build custom tools that are easy to maintain. Non-techies find programming hard; maintaining applications is even harder. Spreadsheets provide the benefits without those problems.
In fact, if we abstract them, they are already close to a generic program or a computer.
Spreadsheet | Program | Computer |
---|---|---|
Formulas | Logic | Processing |
Dependencies | Triggers | I/O |
Cells | UI | I/O |
Values | DB | Storage |
Classic spreadsheets are still behind on things like UI, automation or APIs. They are needlessly ugly and static for today’s day and age.
I have started a company to do fix this with others who feel the same pains. We a are building Rows, a a new spreadsheet, with data Integrations and slick, Live Sharing.!
You can follow Rows on twitter. (link).