@ogadaki's demo today[1] and Avi Bryant's demo a couple of weeks ago[2] has me thinking of this post @Mariano Guerra shared a couple of months ago[3]: https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/the-intensional-spreadsheet [1] https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C0120A3L30R/p1593813312058700 [2] https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1592347969348200 [3] https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1587457167095700

Lotus made a spreadsheet called Improv for the NextStep OS that was to my thinking the next evolution of the spreadsheet. Unfortunately when Jobs got rehired by Apple, the Next computer was tossed aside, as he had bigger fish to fry, and the tiny installed base of NextStep programmers were left adrift, teams disbanded, etc. Then Lotus was sold to IBM which was the final blow because new products have great difficulty escaping the mediocrity machine that is the current IBM. I was around when IBM was the greatest company in the world, with constant breakthroughs of fundamental technologies. As others have pointed out Apple was a harvester of existing technology, but IBM invented things. They had virtual machines in the 60's (CP/CMS), 30 years before VMware. Too bad they didn't push CP/CMS more, it was better than their lousy TSO time sharing system.

Most interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv

I cannot understand why someone doesn't copy Improv. There is a spreadsheet for Windows from a small firm that does very similar things; can't remember the name. It's a very expensive enterprise type of pricing product. I know Mitch got rich from the sale to IBM, but I wish he hadn't because Lotus was a real high quality software company, and merging them with IBM was like what Vivendi did to Broderbund and the dozens of other educational software companies, destroy them in the end. Mergers among software companies have a nasty habit of destroying the teams that made the firm great in the first place.

Thanks @Kartik Agaram for reposting this article. I didn't have time to read it when @Mariano Guerra first shared it, and it is very interesting. In fact at leats I learned "intensional" and even if it the advanced spreadsheet presented here seems powerful, I don't see very well how it is really useful to solve real problems. But I must confess that the spreadsheet is a programming tool that I am less incline to use...

"intensional logic, the logic of values that vary over a coordinate space." Maybe a nitpick, but this feels like a weird definition of intensional logic (here's a better explanation: intensional logic has to do with words having more meaning than mere reference). I don't think I want actual intensional logic in my sheets; I want referential transparency. I want 1+1 to always equal 2. Beyond that, I think there are some interesting ideas in the there although it feels like someone who doesn't use spreadsheets trying to fix them: excel has some tools like pivot tables, what-if analysis, and table objects that accomplish a lot some of what the author is asserting spreadsheets can't do...in addition to RC notation, that he admitted not knowing about.