This would be an ideal place for a semi-technical user to contribute documentation. Good starter open-source contribution. Without that, it's hard to figure out if it would work for me, let alone give feedback.
So what, who want raw wild naked large exposure? If you don’t get an army of free PR specialists, lawyers and body guards to protect you and your beloved ones h24 every single day for the rest your lives, it’s an obviously net negative situation.
Some of the motivation for this comes from how often devs want to contribute to open source but are intimidated by how difficult the barrier of entry is, particularly for large projects. It's surprisingly hard to find a good list of projects that a beginner or even intermediate programmer can substantially contribute to. The ones that do exist tend to have the low hanging fruit plucked pretty quickly.
- Most of my career was made by being the author of one popular open source platform which happened to do well.
- I've recruited people based on open-source contributions. If I want an expert in [X], finding someone who contributed to [X] is a good bet.
- The flip side is I've made (minor, helpful) contributions to many projects in part for exposure. My name is in the commit list of many systems in domains where I have wanted to work.
- Many mid-sized contributions look good on a resume, especially for a junior developer. Indeed, I've made one case to promote someone based, in part, on contributing to a library we were using (even if only tangentially).
If you want a job in e.g. network security, find something in a firewall, anonymzing proxy, packet sniffer, or whatnot, and make a PR. It's often quick, easy, and helpful. A corollary is you do actually learn a lot about a system by contributing.
I have no axe to grind here, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted.
I love open source. My cynicism isn't about open-source, but about the OP's first post being "these docs suck, snaps fingers maybe one of you non-devs can work on it."
That's more a salesperson mantra than SWE, where for every 10-100 people you ask, someone buys something. However, I've raised money many times simply by shamelessly asking.
Second good life lesson: Don't assume things about others.
People who make $1/day, $10/day, $100/day, $1000/day, $10,000/day, etc. have fundamentally different priorities and motivations. Ditto on many other axes. Good synergies are leveraged working across such differences.
This sounds made up tbh. I mean, I agree it's common to feel this "pressure" but the day you discover the pressure isn't real is the day you level up. And I charge plenty for fixing peoples' software pains.
I do open-source and write blog posts to satisfy my own desire to publicize my work, and for exposure, and to put my skills on display. Not as a race to the bottom. I could have had a career without those things.
I tried to install, and discovered yet again why I fell out of love with Python.
Executing:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
gave this error:
" Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/tmp/tmprhazpypn", line 126, in prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel
hook = backend.prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel
AttributeError: module 'sipbuild.api' has no attribute 'prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel'
...
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: /usr/bin/python3 /tmp/tmprhazpypn prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel /tmp/tmpl72s0sfd Check the logs for full command output."
I tried to install it on ubuntu 22.04 and got a different error using pip. I'm not experienced enough with Python to quickly figure out how to proceed. It's a shame it isn't easier to install.
stop trying to use the system python for application development. You will break your OS and you will make your code machine specific. Go read up on Virtual Envs , you were the problem here.
And for the lazy ones, pipx uses Virtual Envs and can install most things from a path, an archive or a package name. Install pipx and check pipx install --help.
That being said, venv is the official solution, and it works fairly well. pipenv/pipx are some alternatives...but yeah.
What exactly is your system installation for if you aren't supposed to install anything to it? The package system should be able to attempt installing via venv or be able to block uncompatible packages with sane error messages.
> stop trying to use the system python for application development.
Umm... who exactly makes sure the app runs correctly with the version of python installed by the system?
I, for one, aren't going to bump up a python version to run a single app in a virtual environment because some dev decided to use 'python nightly' to code against.
If venvs were a reasonable solution here, presumably the pyspread authors would have included them in the installation instructions. Instead they just say to "pip install", which predictably does not work for most people.
It sounds a bit unfair to tell someone that "they're the problem" when they followed the official installation instructions to the letter. I would agree in classifying this as another case of python developers being unable to provide a working way to install their software (if code that the average person can't even get to execute can even be called "software".)
You're not really supposed to pip install applications. pip is a developer tool. There is pipx which is great, but I still think it's a developer tool. It's annoying when projects say to pip install stuff. It's never the right thing to do.
Compare this with the comments above re nix where it just ran - although to get a python app to build on nix is a pain but at least only one person has to do it.
the magic power of spreadsheets is that they encourage improvisation, and it probably applies to that one.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.
and _that_ is why I'm still very sad that Lotus Improv didn't make it in the marketplace --- gathering all the formulae into one pane was _incredible_ for organization and providing a single top-level view of what a spreadsheet was doing.
I really wish Flexisheet would get to a usable point, or that Quantrix wasn't so expensive.
This is of course the correct answer to the question. But additionally, I made the joke because I somewhat Identified with the 'Jack' use case mentioned in one of the pages on the PySpreads site
I see it uses numerical designations for both the columns and rows allowing indexing like a 2D matrix. Nice. One of the many annoyances of Excel is the alphabetic columns that make even less sense beyond 26.
Baby mode?! As a full grown adult, I find the cognitive load of the base 26 arithmetic of "what column is an offset of 8 to the right of AW" to be exactly what I needed to fully forget about what I came there to do in the first place
some of us have some logical dyslexia, so when I see a tuple of numerics, even if you say (this is the row, this is the column, this is the table), when I'm manipulating references, or finding a tuple in the dark, I easily mix up the order of the bits, because lets face it, it's arbitrary.
So, while your logic makes sense, it voids humanity in a rather stark way which I suppose is fine, but it's not like I'm incapable of programming. I just have to be careful about how I name variables and use keywords in python more often than args.
I think one major difference between spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks is state/dependency graph. In a notebook, cells don't depend on each other. They can be run many times, and the order they're run in matters. This is one of the major gotchas with notebooks. With spreadsheets, they're generally deterministic. There is no notion of "cell order", cells are recomputed automatically depending on the dependency graph between the cells. This results in a pretty big user experience difference.
Yes in that it doesn't appear to use a dependency graph to track recomputes; it recomputes everything on a cell change (according to another commenter anyways). But the UX effect is still the same in that the user never has to think about cell order, and every cell is always consistent with each other.
Python is a bad language for this, because one-liners are awkward. Multiline code is possible but ugly due to indentation-based syntax. Brace-based languages would be far more suitable here.
My understanding is that with CAD software you can go backwards and have (near?) infinite edit history, in a way you cannot with Blender. Which makes it very, very useful.
A lot of cad software actually has an editable history: you can go back 100 steps and modify a dimension or a step and have the rest of the model updated to take that new dimension into account.
I wouldn’t work with any cad software that didn’t have that ability.
This is called parametric design. Since CAD programs do not operate on meshes, this allows you to e.g. change the dimension on some part and have the rest adjust accordingly.
How well this works depends on the situation, if changing a parameter causes new faces to appear on the object this is usauayvwry difficult to handle, even for commercial CAD programs.
Blender wasn't originally designed to be used for CAD type applications. It's possible of course, but you're likely better off with something specifically meant for precision CAD models. Specifically for 3d printing, I don't think blender is ideal.
I think most programmers like OpenSCAD - what better way to make parametric CAD models than by writing code?
OpenSCAD is really good for parametric designs. One of the first things I designed in OpenSCAD was a bicycle sprocket where you could input how many teeth you wanted, link length, how thick, etc. and OpenSCAD would generate the sprocket according to those parameters. I recall seeing a while back that blender was adding support for this kind of thing so I'm sure it's possible, but it was very intuitive in OpenSCAD.
For any large project I'm sure Blender (or FreeCAD) would be a better choice, but as someone with some programming background just starting out, OpenSCAD feels way more accessible.
I've tried a lot of 3D software over the years, and OpenSCAD has been the one I've been most successful with (along w/ Carbide Create, but I work for that company....)
Currently working on a library which makes the two work together:
Though I'd recommend FreeCAD over OpenSCAD as a 3D modeling tool for most users as an alternative to traditional CAD tools...and therein lies the distro problem.
Gimp is really not great for photo editing IMO - it really shines at photo manipulation. (i.e. it is Photoshop, not Lightroom.)
For RAW development (a la Lightroom), DarkTable and RawTherapee exist. I've only tried the former, and found it incredibly difficult to use.
I also prefer Krita for digital illustration (though maybe that's unfair - it's best at digital painting specifically.) Of course, if you need vector support, Inkscape is the obvious answer.
But why do you even need a distro to begin with just to ship certain software set? Install Arch/Gentoo and install whatever is your preferred software of choice, or hell, you can even do that on any other distro.
Isn’t that basically package groups (or whatever the district-specific terms are)?
Eg Im pretty sure Ubuntu Desktop has some kind of “Productivity” package group that includes a word processor and spreadsheets and an email client and what not. I’m pretty sure it’s selected by default when you do a full desktop install. I don’t recall what the actual software is, but I would imagine LibreOffice.
I would agree with OP that it doesn’t really make sense for a distro, though. People really want to “make a distro” for some reason so we end up with silly shit like Kubuntu (Ubuntu… with KDE pre-installed).
My general rule of thumb is if I can point the distro’s OS package manager to the distro’s upstream (ie Ubuntu for Kubuntu, or Debian for Ubuntu) and everything works or mostly works, it should be a script or apt repo and not a distro.
There are way too many “Ubuntu but with a different default DE” distros that could really just be a modified install ISO or post-install script.
It seems to not be a true spreadsheet with dependency tracking and instead it recomputes everything after each change. Whis probably kind-of obvious as how to track the dependencies for arbitrary Python code is not that obvious. But without resorting to some static analysis magic one could just track accesses to the magic S[] during the excecution of the cell, its value cannot depend on anything else than what was accessed during the evaluation.
One issue with this is that arbitrary Python code can have arbitrary side-effects.
Your suggestion reminds me a lot of fine-grained reactivity like in SolidJS, which makes sense, since spreadsheets basically operate on reactive programming. Some great articles by Ryan Carnatio on the topic.
The side-effects thing comes in if a user puts in some side-effect in a dependent cell, which is equivalent to adding side-effects in a memo in reactive-speak.
Shame it's GPL3. That counts it out of being included in FreeCAD, which I can't help but feel would be an improvement on the current spreadsheet workbench.
Not actually "in Excel", though. The Python code runs on Microsoft's servers (they say in the introduction) and Excel is just a client.
There's no reason they couldn't embed CPython in Excel, but maybe the intention was for the online version of Excel to have feature parity without having to compile Python to JavaScript?
the intention is to lock in orgs to their cloud services. This is a value-add. They really know that Excel, Word are "feature complete" and the only way they're going to make money on it is by harvesting and locking in the users.
I'd like to give praise for the "Target User Group" section on the homepage.
Not only does it say what users the app is for, but also who it is NOT for. I think this kind of information is invaluable in deciding whether or not to use or suggest an app.
I can understand if app developers want EVERYBODY to user their app (whether or not its the best for the job) or if the app developer just doesn't want to take the time to write out who the app is NOT for. But I will praise those who do include that information.
I like it and I'll take it a step further. I think this is important information for a developer to admit to THEMSELVES at least. Being all things to all people is a route straight to burnout for an open source project.
I wish Stackoverflow included "daily operating system" in their surveys, but I'd wager that 50%+ of professional developers use MacOS. For many reasons probably, but for me it's simply because it's a nice BSD system that translates well to Linux servers (prod).
> but I'd wager that 50%+ of professional developers use MacOS
Ok, I will take that bet against you. If you think it true, then you are living in a bubble. Probably 90% use MS Windows with no choice, because they work in a big enterprise that uses MS Office and Exchange/Outlook. For enterprise email, is there any competition at this point? I don't know any.
In that case, I would take your side of the bet! US startup devs appears (from HN) to have pretty liberal hardware policies. If choosing a laptop, many will choose the best hardware, which is currently a MacBook.
pip install pyspread works just fine on macOS (assuming you have pip and python installed, which anyone who would be interested in having a python-enabled spreadsheet would have).
After reading the parent comment - I thought to myself “so what”.
But after reading it on the product page - I fully agree: seeing clearly the targeted personas and out of scope usage significantly elevates my trust in the product and the team behind it.
Shameless plug: If you have bigger data sets, check out https://rowzero.io
We scale up to hundreds of millions of rows and have native Python support.
You can define functions in Python and call them as formulas from any spreadsheet cell. We seamlessly marshal Pandas dataframes from Python land to spreadsheet land and back. [1]
We're also hosted and support real time collaboration like Google Sheets. We reimplemented the Excel formula language. We connect directly to Postgres, S3, Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks. And the first workbook is free.
Interestingly, Giles Thomas (the guy behind Python Anywhere) originally developed a Pythonic Spreadsheet application, called Resolver One, and then iterated to a a web-based version, called Project Dirigible.
Python Anywhere eventually span out from Project Dirigible when they realised that it was mostly being used for "generic" Python development rather than being used as a spreadsheet. There's an interesting write-up on this evolution here: https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/197/, and a demo of Dirigible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZoIp-5NaiQ.
122 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadThis would be an ideal place for a semi-technical user to contribute documentation. Good starter open-source contribution. Without that, it's hard to figure out if it would work for me, let alone give feedback.
- Most of my career was made by being the author of one popular open source platform which happened to do well.
- I've recruited people based on open-source contributions. If I want an expert in [X], finding someone who contributed to [X] is a good bet.
- The flip side is I've made (minor, helpful) contributions to many projects in part for exposure. My name is in the commit list of many systems in domains where I have wanted to work.
- Many mid-sized contributions look good on a resume, especially for a junior developer. Indeed, I've made one case to promote someone based, in part, on contributing to a library we were using (even if only tangentially).
If you want a job in e.g. network security, find something in a firewall, anonymzing proxy, packet sniffer, or whatnot, and make a PR. It's often quick, easy, and helpful. A corollary is you do actually learn a lot about a system by contributing.
I have no axe to grind here, but I think the cynicism is unwarranted.
That's more a salesperson mantra than SWE, where for every 10-100 people you ask, someone buys something. However, I've raised money many times simply by shamelessly asking.
Second good life lesson: Don't assume things about others.
People who make $1/day, $10/day, $100/day, $1000/day, $10,000/day, etc. have fundamentally different priorities and motivations. Ditto on many other axes. Good synergies are leveraged working across such differences.
Devs are expected to contribute to FOSS, write free educational blog posts about technology, and fix your friends computer!
Ask a doctor why something hurts and they tell you to come into their office and insurance will bill you.
I do open-source and write blog posts to satisfy my own desire to publicize my work, and for exposure, and to put my skills on display. Not as a race to the bottom. I could have had a career without those things.
https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/getting_started/install.html
https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/10min.html
Executing:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
gave this error:
" Traceback (most recent call last): File "/tmp/tmprhazpypn", line 126, in prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel hook = backend.prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel AttributeError: module 'sipbuild.api' has no attribute 'prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel'
...
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: /usr/bin/python3 /tmp/tmprhazpypn prepare_metadata_for_build_wheel /tmp/tmpl72s0sfd Check the logs for full command output."
I'm on Linux Mint 19.
Their docs don’t say that, they advertise exactly what the GP ran. Python needs to unfuck its ecosystem.
That being said, venv is the official solution, and it works fairly well. pipenv/pipx are some alternatives...but yeah.
What exactly is your system installation for if you aren't supposed to install anything to it? The package system should be able to attempt installing via venv or be able to block uncompatible packages with sane error messages.
Node.js is similar with npm.
Is there something like nvm but for Python?
Umm... who exactly makes sure the app runs correctly with the version of python installed by the system?
I, for one, aren't going to bump up a python version to run a single app in a virtual environment because some dev decided to use 'python nightly' to code against.
Dealing with outdated/bugs is just a regular day under the guise of 'stable'.
The only reason you even are using Mint is because conical did a marketing trick sending free CDs in 2000s.
you have only one data structure (the 2D table), data types are super-weak, there are no variable names... all of this guarantee a maintenance nightmare, and rightfully scares developers. But it's also a very low barrier to entry. You've got data, you paste them into the grid, and you start toying with them, before having figured anything about them.
That's an amazing superpower, when targeting non-developers, and that's why Excel is the most used programming language over the world, by far: it's probably got an order of magnitude more users than there are trained developers in the world.
I really wish Flexisheet would get to a usable point, or that Quantrix wasn't so expensive.
I searched the web but still unclear.
His Excel-lence also recommends this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg
The "real" answer is to use names and tables. That and generally not having data flying up down left and right.
Also, when you need names, it is a sign to reach for a proper programming enviroment like Delphi or Lazarus.
So, while your logic makes sense, it voids humanity in a rather stark way which I suppose is fine, but it's not like I'm incapable of programming. I just have to be careful about how I name variables and use keywords in python more often than args.
- pyspread for a spreadsheet
- LyX for a word-processor
- OpenSCAD for a 3D modeler
- TkzEdt (or ipe) for 2D drawing
&c.
(and I'd be interested in suggestions for similar software for other tasks, esp. presentations and database work)
I wouldn’t work with any cad software that didn’t have that ability.
How well this works depends on the situation, if changing a parameter causes new faces to appear on the object this is usauayvwry difficult to handle, even for commercial CAD programs.
I think most programmers like OpenSCAD - what better way to make parametric CAD models than by writing code?
For any large project I'm sure Blender (or FreeCAD) would be a better choice, but as someone with some programming background just starting out, OpenSCAD feels way more accessible.
Currently working on a library which makes the two work together:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
(which is currently quite primitive/basic, and even when fully developed is not likely to be used by anyone else)
The most important difference is that Blender operates on meshes, CAD programs don't.
Blender for 3D graphics.
Gimp for photo editing.
Inkscape for illustration.
Though I'd recommend FreeCAD over OpenSCAD as a 3D modeling tool for most users as an alternative to traditional CAD tools...and therein lies the distro problem.
I was trying to think of unusual programs with non-standard approaches.
Perhaps rather than FreeCAD either BRL-CAD, or maybe the recently announced Dune 3D:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40228068
Also, Blender w/ CADsketcher (the Solvespace solver) is quite good:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856383
Though maybe Solvespace would be a better match?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33571555
For RAW development (a la Lightroom), DarkTable and RawTherapee exist. I've only tried the former, and found it incredibly difficult to use.
I also prefer Krita for digital illustration (though maybe that's unfair - it's best at digital painting specifically.) Of course, if you need vector support, Inkscape is the obvious answer.
Eg Im pretty sure Ubuntu Desktop has some kind of “Productivity” package group that includes a word processor and spreadsheets and an email client and what not. I’m pretty sure it’s selected by default when you do a full desktop install. I don’t recall what the actual software is, but I would imagine LibreOffice.
I would agree with OP that it doesn’t really make sense for a distro, though. People really want to “make a distro” for some reason so we end up with silly shit like Kubuntu (Ubuntu… with KDE pre-installed).
My general rule of thumb is if I can point the distro’s OS package manager to the distro’s upstream (ie Ubuntu for Kubuntu, or Debian for Ubuntu) and everything works or mostly works, it should be a script or apt repo and not a distro.
There are way too many “Ubuntu but with a different default DE” distros that could really just be a modified install ISO or post-install script.
As power users we may want to do that ourselves, but a lot of people place value in having that curation done for them.
For example: https://alternativeto.net/software/pyspread/
I think there are a plug-ins for Inkscape for presentations.
(It's very similar to the problem of locking in databases)
Your suggestion reminds me a lot of fine-grained reactivity like in SolidJS, which makes sense, since spreadsheets basically operate on reactive programming. Some great articles by Ryan Carnatio on the topic.
The side-effects thing comes in if a user puts in some side-effect in a dependent cell, which is equivalent to adding side-effects in a memo in reactive-speak.
Kill many user from Excel limitation 2^20!!
Not saying Nix(os) Is The Way, but sometimes it does ok.
nix run nixpkgs#pyspread [0/1 built, 3/113/132 copied (1311.8/1721.6 MiB), 280.4/300.7 MiB DL] fetching llvm-16.0.6 from https://cache.nixos.org
https://pasteboard.co/P1eh7B7W8C9R.png
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
There's no reason they couldn't embed CPython in Excel, but maybe the intention was for the online version of Excel to have feature parity without having to compile Python to JavaScript?
If you want to see this done properly (on some limit) look at pyxll.
Pyspread – Spreadsheet with deep Python integration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30426053 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
Pyspread – Spreadsheet implementation in Python, cells return Python objects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7593603 - April 2014 (1 comment)
Show HN: Spreadsheets using Python - Have you seen this? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1884896 - Nov 2010 (47 comments)
PySpread: A spreadsheet that accepts a pure python expressions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265132 - Aug 2008 (3 comments)
Not only does it say what users the app is for, but also who it is NOT for. I think this kind of information is invaluable in deciding whether or not to use or suggest an app.
I can understand if app developers want EVERYBODY to user their app (whether or not its the best for the job) or if the app developer just doesn't want to take the time to write out who the app is NOT for. But I will praise those who do include that information.
This is probably true. I only really talk to US startup devs.
Edit: I can’t read. Disregard.
> While there have been reports that pyspread can be used on OS X, OS X is currently unsupported (can you help?).
I think that would make many non-technical users uncomfortable.
But after reading it on the product page - I fully agree: seeing clearly the targeted personas and out of scope usage significantly elevates my trust in the product and the team behind it.
Have not used the software, but now I want to try
Original Sentence:
> Furthermore, Peter is worried about algorithmic errors and calculation inaccuracies is his complicated tables.
Correction:
> Furthermore, Peter is worried about algorithmic errors and calculation inaccuracies in his complicated tables.
We scale up to hundreds of millions of rows and have native Python support.
You can define functions in Python and call them as formulas from any spreadsheet cell. We seamlessly marshal Pandas dataframes from Python land to spreadsheet land and back. [1]
We're also hosted and support real time collaboration like Google Sheets. We reimplemented the Excel formula language. We connect directly to Postgres, S3, Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks. And the first workbook is free.
[1] https://rowzero.io/docs/code-window
- Only I have access (private / personal use)
- The universe has access (open-source use)
But one free workbook still beats the typical 30-day trial.
Python Anywhere eventually span out from Project Dirigible when they realised that it was mostly being used for "generic" Python development rather than being used as a spreadsheet. There's an interesting write-up on this evolution here: https://blog.pythonanywhere.com/197/, and a demo of Dirigible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZoIp-5NaiQ.
Project dirigible ended up being open sourced here: https://github.com/pythonanywhere/dirigible-spreadsheet.
Looks like it is
a) a stand-alone X11 app (not easily runnable on macos) b) using python instead of elisp.
Is that roughly accurate ? I can't easily understand from the post.
It was .Net based but did not make enough money. I wonder if done now there would be enough support to open source something like this.
For a review see https://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/27/first-look-at-resolver-...