Calc research & funcalc ...

Fri Sep 21 12:14:39 UTC 2018

Hi Trent,

About a year ago, I thought up an idea on my own very like Funcalc, that I called Scriptsheets.  At the time, I did not know Funcalc and its predecessors, going back about 20 years, existed.  I briefly though I had had a Very Original Idea.  Alas, it was not so.  See: https://haskell.markmail.org/search/?q=scriptsheets .

Cool! Funcalc doesn’t go 20 years back. The original inspiration came from a 2003 paper by Simon Peyton-Jones et al. called: “A User-Centred Approach to Functions in Excel” which suggested the idea but did not implement AFAIK. There are a few papers on the subject on my supervisor’s site as well as other resources which I linked earlier.

There have been some attempts at scripting spreadsheets (even with Haskell) but I do not recall the titles. Also, there was a document that described a spreadsheet implemented in the functional language Clean (I/O) which had some interesting features. For example, I believe lazy evaluation was used to only update cells that were needed to show the current visible section of the spreadsheet.

Given that I am one person, and woefully under-prepared in computer science to accomplish my goals, the odds are I won't get very far on my roadmap before getting distracted.

My own background is biotechnology, so do not let your background discourage you.

Even if I do embark on step 5, the odds are it will wind up as Java-based abandonware like Frege or Jython.

At this stage in your journey, doing is learning which in my opinion is more important than worrying if your software will be abandoned at some point in the future.

But that is not why I am writing.  Can I prevail on the good graces of either of you to look through my first draft prospectus for Scriptsheets to see if, against all odds, there is anything of interest in it?  I would REALLY appreciate feedback from someone involved with spreadsheet professional programming or research.  The text runs 31 dry, boring pages.  I finished it 2017-11-02.

I am in the final stages of my PhD and barely have time for anything else at the moment, so I will unfortunately have to respectfully decline :/ hopefully someone on the mailing list with more time can help.

Mvh/Best regards,

Alexander Asp Bock, PhD student
Computer Science Department<https://computerscience.wikit.itu.dk/>
IT University of Copenhagen<http://en.itu.dk/>

On 19 Sep 2018, at 09.04, trent shipley <trent.shipley at gmail.com<mailto:trent.shipley at gmail.com>> wrote:

About a year ago, I thought up an idea on my own very like Funcalc, that I called Scriptsheets.  At the time, I did not know Funcalc and its predecessors, going back about 20 years, existed.  I briefly though I had had a Very Original Idea.  Alas, it was not so.  See: https://haskell.markmail.org/search/?q=scriptsheets .

I have only a degree in mathematics (at which was was not very good) and a community college certificate in computer programming from the CIS department (at which I did quite well).

At present, my plan is to:

  1.  Finish the Haskell book I'm working on (Hutton 2016) to get some exposure to functional programming.
  2.  Work my way through a book on writing compilers in Java. (Ronald Mak 2009, or maybe I'll get something newer by then.)
  3.  Work through the Calc/Funcalc book.
  4.  Translate the Calc/Funcalc programs from C# into Java.
  5.  Start the Scriptsheets project.

Given that I am one person, and woefully under-prepared in computer science to accomplish my goals, the odds are I won't get very far on my roadmap before getting distracted.  Even if I do embark on step 5, the odds are it will wind up as Java-based abandonware like Frege or Jython.

But that is not why I am writing.  Can I prevail on the good graces of either of you to look through my first draft prospectus for Scriptsheets to see if, against all odds, there is anything of interest in it?  I would REALLY appreciate feedback from someone involved with spreadsheet professional programming or research.  The text runs 31 dry, boring pages.  I finished it 2017-11-02.

Regards,

Trent.

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 2:56 AM Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at collabora.com<mailto:michael.meeks at collabora.com>> wrote:
Hi Alexander,

On 18/09/18 10:26, Alexander Bock wrote:
> I would be delighted to join one of the hackfests if time allows. Is
> there a schedule available somewhere?

        We typically have one in Hamburg at some stage in the year - which
would be near you; the ESC minutes have details on all of those as they
come up (posted to this list weekly). We also have a larger hackfest in
Brussels before or after FOSDEM - which is an excellent conference to
attend anyway =)

> I know of EUSPRIG as well and their horror stories
> <http://eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm>

        Some good stories there =) Thanks for the list of conferences.

> Do you run any of the generated OpenCL kernels in parallel or do you run
> a normal sequential recalculation and call the kernel code as necessary?
> I would suspect the latter given the information you have provided so far :)

        Only in very recent times (the last generation) has typical GPU
hardware become capable of running multiple kernels simultaneously
and/or pre-empting running kernels. This leads to amusing situations -
whereby moving the mouse while a long running sheet calculates would
simply not be able to render - until a Windows / TDR was triggered. We
had to come up with heuristics to break down the CL workload into
bite-sized chunks to avoid this. More modern hardware doesn't have this
issue though.

        And yes, we use CL when we think it makes sense - based on weights and
complexity of the relevant formulae. Otherwise we use the old
interpreter (or now its threaded variant - again depending on complexity).

        HTH,

                Michael.

--
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