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Dec 2, 2022

Friends, I’m giving a talk for @reClojure 2022! It’s about “Homoiconic Spreadsheets”, a distillation of years of noodling about programming & UIs.

It’ll be live at 10:30am CST tomorrow Saturday. Would love to see you there, register for free at reclojure.org

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1:23 AM · Jan 3, 2023

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My key points in the talk are: 🌎 Spreadsheets matter. Used by billions of people, they're the easiest way to go beyond being a point-and-click user and start doing useful programming. twitter.com/elzr/status/15

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Dec 2, 2022

The frame of the talk will be @gordonbrander’s 2021 essay imagining a

“Kardashev scale for interfaces”. It got me think furiously about how spreadsheets could reach the next level of expressive potential: the meta-programming of Lisp. subconscious.substack.com/p/a-kardashev-

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🔥 Spreadsheets are changing. In 2022 Excel & Google Sheets got lambdas & named functions, a new level of native expressive potential! In 2018 Excel got spilled arrays (a feature Sheets pioneered). A cell can now write to others, grids can be written as text with array notation.

💎 Spreadsheets have an essence, what Alan Kay described as "the value rule" back in 1984: a cell can read from any other but can only write to itself. This is the founding, simplifying constraint of spreadsheets, akin to how structured programming outlawed go-to’s in code.

🕰️ Spreadsheets are time-less. The consequence of the value rule is that there is no time in spreadsheets. There are no unfolding sequences or loops or conditionals, execution happens in a subjective instant after a user change and only then.

🕰️Spreadsheets are easy because they're time-less & space-full. They do without the trickiest part of computation, invisible unfolding time, and are built around a handy, simplified space, an interactive grid that's a fantastic aid to thinking.

🤯Homoiconicity can be practical! When translated to spreadsheets, it reveals itself as very related to (live) copy-paste, links, transclusion & component/instance relationships.

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Dec 3, 2022

Almost forgot, my talk's 3rd major influence was the lovely "gridlets" research by @NimaJohari, Jack Williams et al at @MSFTResearch. A consequence of homoiconicity in spreadsheets is "gridlets" (aka "live copy-paste")! See microsoft.com/en-us/research cc @supercgeek & @neurocy

✨ To sum up: Spreadsheets are old but they've never been "finished", they've kept evolving and they merit a new look!