Show HN: ClojureScript REPL within Excel

by theocs • 11 years ago

83 10 11 years ago

mfikes• 11 years ago

This reminds me of one of the points pg makes in What Made Lisp Different [1], under #9:

  "compiling at runtime is the basis of Lisp's use as an extension language in programs like Emacs"

This Excel capability is an extremely cool demonstration of where ClojureScript's self-hosting capability can take us. Seems like there's no stopping it. Kudos to Christian Felde!

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

ghufran_syed• 11 years ago

I love the idea of this, but then started to wonder what this would let me do. Can I take data from an arbitrary set of input cells, pass them through a sequence of clojurescript functions, then output the result(s) back to the spreadsheet?

WBrentWilliams• 11 years ago

I would hope that would be the ultimate goal. However, that might not be possible without at least some VBA work. Experimentation will have to be undertaken.

The real question is how do you sell the ClojureScript "macro" to an end user that, ultimately, doesn't care how the answer in the spreadsheet is arrived at, so long as it is correct.

theocs2• 11 years ago

Glad you like it :)

You can bind to arbitrary data regions using named items. For example:

cljs.user=> (add-binding-named-item "A1:B2" "binding-id" println)

nil

{:rc 2, :cc 2, :type matrix, :id binding-id}

cljs.user=> (get-binding-data "binding-id" println)

nil

{:rc 2, :cc 2, :type matrix, :id binding-id, :data [[1 2] [3 4]]}

cljs.user=> (set-binding-data! "binding-id" [[2 3] [4 5]])

moonchrome2• 11 years ago

why use continuation functions (... println) instead of returning values ? Is it because of the underlying JS API is async ? Maybe use something like chans to pipe async values ? Just doesn't seem clojureish to me :D

mraison• 11 years ago

Awesome! Now I'm dreaming of a world where people would learn ClojureScript instead of writing VBA macros :)

bauser• 11 years ago

Very cool. Looks like a promising project

Show HN: ClojureScript REPL within Excel

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