
The Intensional Spreadsheet - herodotus
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/the-intensional-spreadsheet/
======
jkaptur
Very cool ideas. I'm surprised that the article didn't mention R1C1 mode [0],
which seems to be a big step towards the "intensional" view of a formula.

0\. [https://bettersolutions.com/excel/formulas/cell-
references-a...](https://bettersolutions.com/excel/formulas/cell-
references-a1-r1c1-notation.htm).

~~~
zokier
I was thinking that the article overall felt bit out of touch with what Excel
does these days, then I checked the date on the date on the linked original
IEEE article and its from 1990, 30 years ago. No wonder it is bit difficult to
place in modern context. "A while back" indeed.

~~~
laumars
R1C1 is even older still. It was first released in 1982 as the the cell
addressing for Microsoft Multiplan (so we are talking pre-Excel).

Microsoft only later adopted A1 formulas to fall in line with VisCal and Lotus
1-2-3.

------
quantified
The multidimensional spreadsheet has been around for a long time. The first
product I worked on was one, that competed with others like Lotus Improv, CA-
Compete, and one for the Mac that I believe was named FreeBase. That Computer
Associates and Lotus were selling them tells you something right away. I
believe it was IRI that sold Javelin, a spreadsheet with some time-series
capabilities. There are/were many others too. OLAP planning product (of which
I’ve worked on multiple) tend to provide a very spreadsheet-ish outlook on
their UI and modeling capabilities, coupled with real data management.

~~~
Anonymous4C54D6
So, what happened to all of these? I feel like a multidimensional spreadsheet
would be a great alternative to things like MS Access.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I've been looking into this space a bit (after one day realizing that what I'm
doing at work is essentially reinventing OLAP abstractions). The way I see it,
multidimensional spreadsheeting has evolved into expensive, proprietary ERP
and BI software, while the ideas from it end up being repeatedly reinvented in
various "excel killer"/"more complicated CRUD" startups without ever reaching
their full potential (I'm guessing that would kill the business value). The
middle doesn't seem to exist (EDIT or maybe it does?[1]) - I don't know of any
actual multidimensional spreadsheet that's accessible to regular people.

There was Egeria[0] featured on HN some years ago, but they've seem to have
reverted to a closed beta since then.

\--

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18656746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18656746)

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22927875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22927875)
points out [https://www.xcubes.net/](https://www.xcubes.net/), which seems
like the "middle" I was looking for.

~~~
quantified
The multidimensional spreadsheet is a more complex piece of software than the
2-D, and invites more data that needs to be managed and processed. So it
trends to a more database-like system. There might be a niche for small and
even-more-complex modeling. It’s hard to open-source something that takes the
required investment.

------
refrigerator
Love it — a step towards letting people do algebra instead of arithmetic
(going up one level of abstraction, basically).

We've implemented almost precisely this in Causal
([https://causal.app](https://causal.app)) — models come with the 'time'
dimension as a first-class citizen [1], letting you write a single formula
like

    
    
       Revenue[t] = Revenue[t-1] * (1 + Growth Rate)
    

to calculate the Revenue at all points in time. And you can do vectorised
operations along the time dimension by writing formulas like this:

    
    
       Profit = Revenue - Costs
    

where Revenue and Costs, and therefore Profit, vary over time.

\---

[1]: You can specify the time dimension yourself, e.g. "Monthly, Jan 2018 –
Jan 2023" or "Yearly, 2020 – 2030"

~~~
Lukas1994
I'm working with @refrigerator on Causal. We also came up with a similar way
of nesting spreadsheets (here’s a demo video:
[https://www.loom.com/embed/0d7a784308c345e08e72451ed854c590](https://www.loom.com/embed/0d7a784308c345e08e72451ed854c590)).

In Causal any cell (we call them variables) can be computed by another
spreadsheet (we call them models). To make this more powerful a model can have
input parameters like functions in programming languages. So a model can be
composed of reusable submodels.

There’s a bunch of spreadsheet templates floating around the internet but
there’s no way to compose them or update them. Wouldn’t it be great to have
something like npm for spreadsheet models?

~~~
chrisweekly
yes, that would be great!

