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Hello, I am currently building a lowcode platform ...
# thinking-together
j
Hello, I am currently building a lowcode platform for easy and fast backend development. Basically, you write logic using functions which look like excel functions or UDFs. Do you have any opinions on programming using Excel? I have written prototypes many times using it, but main problems have been 1) not being able to use it as a backend 2) more complex sheets are hard to understand and test
And just to share a demo that now works: scrape main content of a web page, ask a question about it, and you will get an answer (powered by OpenAI API gpt-4o-mini)
Copy code
api_key=PIPELINE_ENV('OPENAI_API_KEY')
page=SCRAPE_URL('<https://www.yle.fi/news|https://www.yle.fi/news>')
answer=OPENAI_QA(api_key, page, 'any news related to Posti?')
So basically logic is expressed as a sequence of functions (and not as cells in a sheet)
So my thinking is that maybe a share of programming (in future) could be done using lowcode solutions, which would be possible because of a choice of limiting expressivity and complexity. For example, for complex programs you would still need to use Turing complete languages and human programmers
k
I like the idea of programming in spreadsheets in general, and tend to agree with you that they need some new tools as sheets grow complex. I don't have much direct experience with them, though. I haven't kept up with the past attempts, but I know we've discussed them a bunch here in the past. Let me try to dig up some links..
Oh this was a good one from last year: https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2023/11/10/spreadsheets-and-small-software Treesheets is a particularly memorable project in this area: https://strlen.com/treesheets https://loglo.app experiments with combining a grid with a shared stack per row.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q▾

shows off a project called Flowsheets. A few tantalizing links in rarely-used channels: https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/of-end-user-programming/1573942666.111300.html https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/of-logic-programming/1621430499.000300.html https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/of-music/1625731658.003200.html The history of #CC2JRGVLK has a ton of references to people trying to do this. Most not active here, sadly: https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/introduce-yourself Other than that, there's just too much, but maybe a good starting point is to search for keywords in the top-level view of these channels: https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/thinking-together https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/linking-together https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/share-your-work https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/present-company https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/two-minute-week https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/devlog-together Jari and others, definitely share any resources you've been collecting as well. Or highlight any nuggets you particularly like in the archives. This feels like a topic worth a public list of curated bookmarks. Maybe somebody already knows of one?
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