
Spreadsheets vs. Relational Databases: Bridging the Gap - fogus
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/blog/2009/09/16/spreadsheets-vs-relational-databases-bridging-the-gap/
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Hank_Lenzi
Funny that. Was thinking smth along those lines the other day, as I was
wrestling with my own spreadsheets, I was considering how ML-type languages
would be ideal for spreadsheets.

A column could be of type:

type itemCode = string type itemName = string type itemMaker = string type
itemPrice = int type itemPurchase = int type itemcolumnType = (itemPurchase *
(itemCode * itemName * itemMaker) * itemPrice) list

Types can add dimensions to spreadsheets. The path not taken saves you from
spreadsheet hell. You can only look at so many little rectangles at a time...
Data in a spreadsheet should fit into your visual system. Otherwise, it
requires magic. And, if you do magic -> magic -> magic, which is what
statisticians and data mining specialist do, you end up with a simple graph.

Thinking about it, you can see that Google Docs kinda sucks...Can I tell my
spreadsheet to sort every other row in a column, according to a regex, fuse it
with data from another one and make it generate me a report in Teh Eevil .doc
format? Oh, the Python API you say? Hmmm. I thought Google was all about
clickety click and a "simple interface". Yahoo Pipes fares scores higher here,
except for the fact that they like to be stuck in a corner wearing the funny
pointy hat.

Where's the innovation? With all the money Google's got, you'd expect a little
more.

