August 9, 2024 — Datatables, aka spreadsheets, are arguably the most important visual thought tool.

But no one has designed the perfect textual language for manipulating them.

Until now.

Datatables evolved over the past decade primarily by:

• just doing what Hadley Wickham did in dplyr
• using Mike Bostock's d3 under the hood
• reading all of Jeffrey Heer's papers
• thinking about what would be the best tool for Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie.