Is the author here? Most of this article is about how ubiquitous spreadsheets are and how this language can replace them, but I want to hear the author's honest opinion on if through reasonable spreadsheet user will switch to this.
If you think they will, I also ask, what language that looks like this has ever been used mainstream? Or even in a hacker community? Brainfuck and golf languages are used by a very, very small niche. Regex is probably the most similar, but you only need to learn like 4 symbols to be useful (. * + \). And that hasn't caught on in the average excel user's repertoire.
I really wish something like this would exist and be useful because I share the exact same gripes as the author.
Original author here. Kap is inspired by APL which was very popular back in the day (70's and 80's), and has remained popular within certain segments. There is still enough interest in it to support at least one conference.
There is also J, which is used in real businesses. And K and Q are array languages that is popular in finance.
Kap takes the good ideas of APL, as well as its basic syntax, and attempts to combine that with good ideas from other languages, mainly Lisp. I personally use it as the go-to language to solve problems that most people would use Excel to solve, so clearly it's working for one person.
While Kap can be used as an Excel alternative for some subset of of problems, I have no expectation that the average Excel user will switch to it. Instead, I'm trying to adapt some of the nice user interface ideas of a spreadsheet (editing and formatting) while keeping the rest as a regular language. I also want to ensure it's easy to integrate with spreadsheets (copy&paste between Kap and Excel for example, there is also initial work done to have a realtime link with a running spreadsheet).
If you think they will, I also ask, what language that looks like this has ever been used mainstream? Or even in a hacker community? Brainfuck and golf languages are used by a very, very small niche. Regex is probably the most similar, but you only need to learn like 4 symbols to be useful (. * + \). And that hasn't caught on in the average excel user's repertoire.
I really wish something like this would exist and be useful because I share the exact same gripes as the author.