gonna tweet some random opinions I've had for awhile, with no regard for their originality (maybe everyone already agrees? I might've even already tweeted some of these)

1/ (inspired by conversation about user-defined lambdas in Excel) I really like the idea of carrying around all of my custom-defined functions in a nice little box, spreading out the contents, picking a few to use and composing them together

2/ I never quite grokked spreadsheet functional programming myself because to me, a hallmark of FP is the ability to compose abstractions like map, filter, etc. without materializing the intermediate steps, and spreadsheets want a copy of your data for each individual transform

3/ Discussions about the power of spreadsheet programming rarely mention a huge asset, which is the blank canvas of cells. Being able to shape a custom UI directly alongside your data is extremely powerful

4/ Spreadsheet UI is extremely compelling because it's everything we loved about HTML table layout, but idiomatic. Separating form and content is a powerful abstraction but at small scale, combining the two is more joyful

gtg to a meeting, might continue later

5/ I want an editor that enthusiastically embraces spreadsheet UI creation: toggle the grid on/off, make it much easier to set and resize borders around cells. Wonder if people don't build these features because they associate table-based design vaguely with "bad practice"

6/ Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc. sacrifice the raw, untyped power of spreadsheets/the blank canvas in favor of flexible pre-designed views, significantly richer data types, and platform connectivity

so I've come to think of those apps as higher-level languages whereas spreadsheets are like assembly. I want to compile from Airtable to spreadsheets, not just CSV export but preserving all of the relationships and formatting and functions in my data