a coworker of mine and i are just a little doubtful that it's smart enough to figure out where the cells are 100% of the time
it works totally fine in simple cases like (cell= [one-cell another-cell])
or (cell= (:something some-cell))
, but as the expressions get more and more complex, we think trusting it is a bit of a leap of faith
the big thing for me, though, is that it isn't immediately obvious to the human reading the code where the cells are
it feels a bit too magic to me sometimes
i've never seen a case where a formula couldn't figure out which things are cells, because it just calls cell?
on them
but when you want to do some certain types of things it can be difficult for a human
especially if you need to do something like (formulet [x (cell 100)] (when @some-other-cell x))
like if you want to manipulate cells as cells inside a formula, and not just the values contained in the cells
like in the above example the formula wouldn't update when some-other-cell updates
ah! yeah, i guess that would be an example of something you can do with formula-of
and formulet
, but not cell=
, because cell=
eagerly treats cells as their values
it is pretty uncommon to need to do that, though
yeah, there are ways, but it's more quirky
like (cell= (when @~some-other-cell x))
the ~
guy hides some-other-cell
from the cell=
code walker
but it's probably overkill, just use formulet
or whatever in that case for sure
Yeah personally I've found cell=
to be really reliable for what it does. (and yeah formula-of and fomulet handle the cases it's not perfect for)
i can't personally think of an example of cell=
failing to recognize cells, especially if you know how to use ~
the ~
form has some quirks that can be surprising
in other words annoying lol
I way more often get tripped up by the templating nuances in hoplon
conditional children, another landmine
ie if
vs if-tpl
ah, yes, that templating
i feel that part was clearer back when hlisp was a thing, since the only elements you used were markup or special ones
like the templating model made sense if you knew mustache or whatever. now with everything intermingled, more conceptual overhead
ahem, "power" 😬