What non-spreadsheet programming languages/environments do you think work better than Python/Jupiter?
I’ve been fairly happy with the default Matlab IDE personally. Visibility and representation of data has the straightforwardness of a spreadsheet. But surely there must be others?
A lot of environments do not have easy to use hot reloading out-of-the-box (and also quick GUI creation support). This is the primary reason why development feels less intuitive in a lot of text based languages versus more visual tooling like Excel which can give instantaneous feedback.
Hot reloading is most famous for being a staple of Lisp languages (but they tie it to the repl rather than as a standalone feature). For Microsoft languages this is provided by Visual Studio (commonly known as edit-and-continue, it is available in some form or other since the original VB days). You can try it out with the embedded VBA interpreter in Excel (under the Developer tab).
For JavaScript this is a recent innovation (driven primarily by the React/SPA crowd). In Java, most IDEs have the feature but it requires a fair bit of setup and configuration (look up hot swap for Intellij). The closest thing Python has is Jupyter which admittedly is not that pleasant to use.
I really wish Python had the kind of support for Markdown that R does. Notebooks are fine, but the simplicity of having essentially a plain text file is just amazing.
Knitr theoretically supports anything you can call from R. Chunks pass their code and options to "engine" functions that return the results. Knitr provides a bunch of engines out of the box (Python, awk, SQL). But you can also write your own.
yihui.org/knitr/options/#language-engines
I once made a SAS engine to show coworkers how to adopt report automation without having to rewrite all existing code.
I’ve been fairly happy with the default Matlab IDE personally. Visibility and representation of data has the straightforwardness of a spreadsheet. But surely there must be others?