On Apr 21, 2006, at 6:15 PM, Jeffrey Robert Spies wrote:
I'm not exactly sure what the interest is in having a powerful spreadsheet in textmate, as there are some fine open source alternatives,
namely? Please don't say OpenOffice or NeoOffice, because they are bloated and slow for my purposes. I don't need it to be extremely powerful, but I do need it to be fast to load, easy to edit, and easy to create new functions if I want to. For instance, one key function i want to is to be able, from a list of cells, to produce the average of the list after dropping the lowest 3 grades, without having to manually sort the rows that I want to do this in. I just haven't found a way to do it efficiently in NeoOffice, which is what I use when I do need a spreadsheet these days (well, up until now :) ).
I'll also not accept solutions that require X11 and/or are not too easy to install. But if you have some projects in mind. (R.app might do it, I haven't tried it yet. Does it offer a spreadsheet way of editing data?)
but piping commands through R (maybe even using R syntax in your "spreadsheet" file) could rapidly give you additional functionality.
Google R if you haven't heard of it,
Using R actually sounds like a pretty good good idea, though I don't know much about it yet. I actually thought that googling just "r" would be useless, and tried "R language" instead, which indeed gave me some links and much to think about. But it turns out, that searching for "r" also returns the right answer :)
I'll have to look into R more in the future anyway, since I'll be teaching a number of Applied Statistics courses next year. I'll try to incorporate this as an option, like having rows starting with "%R" be passed to R for processing.
Haris