Is there a schematic table editor? (@jonathoda?) I’ve been writing complicated nested conditionals in non-Subtext languages and frequently transcribing them as schematic tables in spreadsheets to understand and refactor them—but man, is it tedious!

That’s interesting. I’ve always wanted to integrate those ideas into my subsequent work but it never fit. Maybe someday… I’d love to see how you model conditionals in a spreadsheet.

Here's a recent one. It's from a function that determines the state to transition to in a state machine. The C code had grown organically for a while and I noticed some duplicated branches, so I converted it to a spreadsheet approximation of a schematic table to be able to see which transitions I could dispatch most easily (like column B and C, then F, because they depend on the fewest values / have the most blank cells). I moved those branches up front in the C code. It helped me simplify the function in the way that I wanted without any existing tests failing, and (surprise) found a bug that I added a new test case to cover. I don't think I could have done that if I'd only worked with the C code (because I tried and failed 😅).

@alltom Nice. Back when I did Schematic Tables there were some tools that made Decision Tables. No idea if they still exist