[rwhaling]

I've been thinking about this a ton lately - I think the holy grail is something that extends the spreadsheet UX with the capability to address much larger data sets, roughly equivalent in power to a Jupyter notebook.

This probably means constraining some of the totally free-form data entry and imposing some kind of discipline onto columns? As well as some way to intuitively group together groups of cell-level formulas into a logical "row", and describe row-level operations, with some kind of rough type checking or duck typing?

But you might want to still retain an ability to lay out the result of computations free-form for invoice and other reporting uses that Excel is still great for?

Better graphical visualization would be nice too and I think that's actually in reach - there are great open source options like vegalite and apache echarts that open up a lot of possibilities for new tools.

[Enginerrrd]

You know, despite being quite different than what you described, what comes close for me in concept is the Spyder IDE. They have pretty reasonable data visualization tools when you go to inspect variables. I find it really nice work in. It lets me do the real visualization and interplay between variables in code or in my head and just quickly inspect tables/vectors/rasters to sanity check as I work in real time.

What's missing is the ability to then manipulate those tables and have it backfeed into the code, but I think that honestly you could again get close to that with some basic right-click>generate new column> type in python expression > translate to input into interpreter type of workflow.

I also know there are some python based excel type programs.

[bradrn]

Despite how many flaws the language itself has, the MATLAB IDE is probably as good at this as Spyder, if not actually better.

[antupis]

I think holy grail is ai-assisted system where you can ask by plain English queries. Something like Wolfram alpha + gtp-3 + erp.

[aitoehigie]

I am currently building exactly this.

A CLI that connects to an SQL database, or allows users to upload .tsv, .csv, .xls files and then run plain English queries against the data source.