Creator or Ellx here. The reason is quite prosaic: I haven't maintained the site for almost a year :/ For various reasons. However, I'm getting back at it now. Ellx as a framework has evolved during this period, and is capable of much more than just a spreadsheet now, but this progress hasn't made it to ellx.io just yet.
May I ask what you liked most about Ellx? What is your use case?
My use case is a tool that produces living documents mixing writing with charts, data, and tabular results that can be delivered to nontechnical clients and updated and modified by staff with excel knowledge.
I’ve found various JS notebooks like starboard and observable JS to be the closest thing, but they’re really not there. PowerBI is a Microsoft solution but it’s dashboard focused.
This sounds pretty much indeed like something I made Ellx for. When you say the notebooks like Observable are "really not there", what exactly is the show stopper for you?
Btw, please ping me on Ellx Discord: let's talk!
Nice. I wrote a similar thing a couple years ago, even "tinier" :)
https://github.com/dmaevsky/tinyx
Immutable state, undo/redo, immer-like patch recording etc in less then 200 lines of code
Ellx founder here.
It will be. It started as a side project which quickly grew into something very versatile, so we are still in search for a product-market fit and a community that would benefit the most from it. Testing hypotheses.
Open source comes with a significant maintenance burden that we just don't have resources right now to carry. Would you like to help?
Different approaches for different aspects. For discipline calculation sheets, there is not much other than having a basic file-level version control and validation engines for importing the data. For other areas, I have built pipelines that maintain diff-able JSON in a repo and handle converting to-from a spreadsheet for their 'UI'. We are also always using or building integrated solutions for data and calculation capturing. My personal push is to introduce discipline engineers to things like Jupyter notebook for "hand" calculations.
I think we should talk! :) From your description I know exactly where you work and which other Python based system you're talking about )
I have been in the industry for 20 years myself as a quant, mostly using Excel as a "glue" layer indeed, and I worked with the Python based "clone" you mentioned too.
For the last two years I have been working on a platform to fix exactly the pain points you are talking about.
Amazing how your post sounds almost like as if I wrote it myself before I started working on this project :)
Please, take a look at https://ellx.io
I would be more than happy to discuss it in detail: dmitry + at + ellxoft.com
Reactive programming is a very solid paradigm. It is hard to get it right though. Especially when calculations are asynchronous.
Excel is ubiquitous but is universally painful to use for anything beyond quick prototyping.
- a platform for visual reactive programming, working in your browser.
ObservableHQ was obviously an inspiration, but we concentrated on making it more production oriented: you can literally build a fully-fledged web application without leaving your browser, around solid reactive abstractions.
I used Excel professionally for 20+ years as a quant in major banks. Mostly as a front end to mathematical models in C++. Always been amazed how a 40 years old UX paradigm is still being used virtually unchanged in modern systems.
Spreadsheets are truly ubiquitous in the financial industry, and for 20 years I've been struggling with exactly the same issues mentioned in the article and in other comments here.
The problem is that neither Excel, nor most alternatives treat a spreadsheet as code that it essentially is. And being code, it needs to
- be source control friendly
- be testable
- have business logic (formulas) decoupled from presentation
Only then one can seriously consider using a spreadsheet as part of any production grade system.
For the past couple of years I've been working on https://ellx.io - a platform for visual reactive programming and a new generation spreadsheet/notebook designed to solve exactly this pain point.
Here are some examples of what you can do with it:
