caveat lector: it's possible all my points here are irrelevant / unhelpful to the thread of discussion that's actually happening. I just felt like being an avatar for "formal equivalence means very little; I mean everything's a Turing machine after all"
If there is a formal equivalence (i.e. spreadsheets and dataflow node and wire can be two skins over the same runtime) why do we consider them to be so separate? Why haven't we seen more explorations morphing and blurring the lines between them?
Oh, so besides the actual mechanism of computation, you're saying that certain affordances matter a lot in making certain tasks easier or harder. The tasks that match these affordances help define the computational substrate.
Do you know of anyone that has done a survey or categorized it?
Comments
- it's easy to throw data into a spreadsheet, with a grid providing meaningful-but-flexible structure
- spreadsheets show live data by default
- spreadsheet cells are roughly uniform size, limiting how complex the interface of a cell can be; nodes can naturally become mini-apps
etc
Do you know of anyone that has done a survey or categorized it?