Ten years ago today, on the blog for Project Dirigible, we announced that we’d recently launched a new site called PythonAnywhere. It almost didn’t happen! The project we were working on was something completely different, and it was only when we looked at how it was being used that we realised that it held the seed of a much better idea.
Project Dirigible was an online spreadsheet, based on Python. Unlike a traditional spreadsheet, where cells can hold only numbers, dates and text, it supported any Python type, so a cell could contain a list, an object, a numpy array, or even a function (so, if you don’t value your sanity very highly, you could write a formula like this: =A1(A2.value, A3[6], A4(A5))).
We’d been hoping that Dirigible would be the breakout success that Resolver One, our desktop Pythonic spreadsheet, had never been, and would help us free the world from the tyranny of Excel. It was getting some interest, with a reasonable number of people signing up and using it, but we’d discovered something odd:
When we asked Dirigible’s beta testers what they were using it for, a surprising number said that it was for general Python development online. They weren’t using the spreadsheet grid at all!
In retrospect, perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising. People want to write Python code, and sometimes they don’t have a computer with it installed to hand – and it’s always useful to have your code accessible so that you can work from anywhere. Programmers have flexibility in the tools they use and can relatively easily move to a new system. By contrast, spreadsheet users have a lot of existing documents that they want to keep, and many of them are far from being technical people. They really don’t want to move to something new.
So, we started PythonAnywhere. Here’s a potted history of what happened next.
from Planet Python
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