FTL: Faster than Light -- Functional Text Language

Stick with me on this one. This is one of those little ideas that turns into a gigantic concept and you soon realise you lack the time to ever implement it. At the end I ask for help in creating a prototype. Volunteers welcome.

Lately I've been translating an Excel-based system into a web application. And it's made me think about the underlying differences between spreadsheet functions and other programming tools.

Functions in spreadsheets are back to front. This is a user-friendly and very powerful twist.

Watch...

function Calc_c1() {
 var a1 = document.getElementById('A1');
 var b1 = document.getElementById('B1');
 var c1 = document.getElementById('C1');
 c1.value = a1.value + b1.value;
}

The following paragraph contains an embedded function.

Mouse over this @p2.Type to read @p3.ToLower(). @p4.ToSentence()

THE FORMULA

or click to edit

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__Total: @Sum(t1..t3)__

'http://' on Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:41:48 GMT, sez:

A declarative (rather than imperative) text-markup form-builder. Nifty-ish.

'SlyW' on Tue, 30 May 2006 15:34:25 GMT, sez:

Surely you must understand that, behind the scenes, Excel has all of the aforementioned event driven code built-in. It simply is at a level that Excel users do not need to interact.

More to the point, the FTL implementation will also contain all of the corresponding event logic only behind the scenes like Excel.

In the end, you have an abstraction of the event model to (hopefully) simplify web application development?

'lb' on Tue, 30 May 2006 20:18:29 GMT, sez:

yep slyw, that's the idea.

i've found that Dan Bricklin (developer of the first spreadsheet, visicalc) has been working on something called 'wikicalc'... i haven't got it to work yet but i think it will do some of the things ftl does... though maybe in a more table-oriented way.

it's here:
http://danbricklin.com/log/aboutwikicalc01.htm

'Wesley Shephard' on Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:14:17 GMT, sez:

There is an interesting declarative user interface found in FrTime for PLT Scheme.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cooper04frtime.html

The idea is that the user interface needs only to declare (like a spreadsheet declares) the code for the UI elements and it uses a heartbeat (the time aspect) to re-evaluate the UI state as time passes.

This means a change to a field will cause another to update "automatically" on the next "tick" of the underlying timer. I saw a presentation on this, and it was quite powerful, although I did (and do) have questions about scalability.

'tarnacious' on Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:41:41 GMT, sez:

Hardware description languages (like VHDL and Verilog) describe not only logic that is faster than light, they can describe logic that occurs concurrently. You actually have to put in propagation delays if you want to describe 'real' hardware.

I haven't used VHDL in years, but, your initial spread sheet formula might be described like this in VHDL:

C1_LOGIC: process(A1,B1)
begin
C1 <= A1 + B1;
end process;

This process will occur whenever A1 or B1 change. You could then use C1 as the trigger for another process if you wanted.

Of course these languages must be synthesized (or actually built) to actually do anything, and it describes hardware not software.

However if anyone is actually interested in FTL, then you should at least be aware of HDL.

'lb' on Tue, 10 Apr 2007 02:46:00 GMT, sez:

i tinkered with VHDL back in university.
Verilog hardware definition language or something.
so you're example:

C1_LOGIC: process(A1,B1)
begin
C1 <= A1 + B1;
end process;

would represent a tiny circuit with a1 and b1 as inputs to a 'summing' circuit (which would be defined elsewhere)

and once the whole circuit is defined, you can use all sorts of optimisations to improve the circuit, since you never have to worry about side effects.

so it's very 'functional' in nature i guess.

or not, i could have this all wrong. the uni years are a blur.

'tarnacious' on Tue, 10 Apr 2007 04:26:36 GMT, sez:

Indeed, my VHDL knowledge is also from hazy uni days.

I do like your idea. And I have always wanted to see a concurrent language (like VHDL) used to describe software. A spreadsheet type application is a perfect starting point, as they are ideally concurrent.

I would also like to see a client side (Javascript/DTML) implementation. I can see a page, with cells, where every cell has an OnChange() event. You would need a compiler of sorts on the page (which would just be a clever javascript function, called first in OnChange() for every cell when the first character is (or was) an '='). When you enter a formula to a cell the 'compliler' adds extra tasks to OnChange() for every cell that the formula references. If you just changed or added a value, you wouldn't need to change any event logic, the correct events would just fire, hopefully in the correct order ;)


Gee, its been a long easter break, not sure if I'm even making sense and probably completely missing the point, but its been fun ;) Now back to work people are actually paying me for, but doesn't seem as much fun :(


Cheers.

'Doekman' on Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:39:49 GMT, sez:

A friend of me implemented a spreadsheet algoritm in javascript. That should ease stuff. It even has comments.

http://www.tuitman.org/downloads/evaluator.zip

'Jason' on Mon, 14 May 2007 13:18:46 GMT, sez:

I think you would be interested in flapjax:

http://www.flapjax-lang.org/tutorial/

'Doekman' on Thu, 17 May 2007 13:25:50 GMT, sez:

OK. I've done it. I made an implementation.

http://zanstra.com/base/blog/faster_than_light

Let all of you know me what you think of it here, since I don't have a commenting system.

'lb' on Thu, 17 May 2007 22:42:12 GMT, sez:

thanks Doekman! Top work .
thanks Jason for flapjax links.

'Chui Tey' on Fri, 15 Jun 2007 00:48:37 GMT, sez:

Actually, given that most Excel usages are around expense forms or timesheets, why not an Excel to HTML translator so that you get instant forms. Just mark certain cells as ReadWrite and off they go.

'lb' on Fri, 15 Jun 2007 01:33:28 GMT, sez:

nice idea chui.
i reckon some people would've done this already -- and i fear how ugly the result would be ;-)

hey i love your blog, by the way, chui. a very nice read -- lots of good info.

'Chui' on Sat, 16 Jun 2007 22:21:26 GMT, sez:

Hi Leon,

I had a look at my company's Excel expense forms, it runs into three tabs (?!!). Some are just computations, but this kinds of make it hard to translate to the web. You might as well let them download the Excel xlt file and fill them in manually.

There was a product that translated Excel into HTML, I lost the bookmark long ago. It would have been cool to write something on the server side to trigger a chain of emails or whatever whenever the Excel form was submitted.

Chui

'Functional is a library for functional programming in JavaScript' on Fri, 02 Nov 2007 04:21:48 GMT, sez:

Functional is a library for functional programming in JavaScript....

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