I love the idea of finding new and better interfaces for spreadsheets, and I applaud this effort!
That being said, if you want this to be useful for people in general, not just programmers:
- People like WYSIWIG. Markdown and the split-pane view seems to be something only programmers like. So I'd suggest being able to do everything, or mostly everything, directly in the rendered/HTML panel. (Maybe the Markdown panel is for power users only)
- This is great for working with individual calculations, but a lot (most?) of spreadsheet use is about applying formulas to whole rows, columns, and tables of values. I see you support basic tables, but they're a huge pain to encode/format/edit in Markdown, and I don't see any ability to support things like 200 rows x 5 columns and do things like calculate sums and averages
So I think there's a ton of potential here! But I think WYSIWIG and easy tabular data support are going to be key here for broader usage. While the kinds of programmers this seems aimed at now, are already using Jupyter notebooks and Matplotlib for this kind of thing. (Like, when you describe "why did I build this", I don't understand why you didn't just fire up a Google Colab notebook.)
Tables are something I want to tackle and I'd like to do them right because (as you point out) are crucial. I didn't get there yet...
I want to make it such that you can code on the left and then hide everything
and share that with non technical folks. That's why I did not use a Colab, creating something interactive with it (and I did that quite a lot in the past)
it's a bit of a PITA.
As a well seasoned web developer, when I'm doing front-end, there are always 2 big problems: Data tables and loading indicators (fun way of saying it's hard to tackle lazy loading without a request waterfall).
The second problem has had good attempts in the recent years, but no single web application can beat excel in terms of data tables (while not 100% relevant anymore, I really like the super light introduction here from Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg )
fwiw:I don't think WYSIWYG is that useful here. It'll by its nature appeal to a crowd that's more technical than the average user. (You won't replace Excel day 1)
There's also the fact that if this is supposed to become more than a design exploration, it might be useful to focus on what this can do that spreadsheets can't - a WYSIWYG editor for spreadsheets is just a spreadsheet.
And I definitely think there's something good here, and that is not a spreadsheet or a colab notebook. It's worth digging into what that might be.
The large tables issue might be solvable with Emacs. Org mode had two table formats, one of which is a veritable spreadsheet. It's all text under the hood, but Emacs (at least with Evil) provides a easy interface to create and populate rows, columns, and cells.
to your first point i think its a good idea to offer both if possible. Like hide the code behind an interface wysiwig-style but give users the option to also edit the code directly if they want to
I've been writing something similar that keeps evolving, although computable code blocks and markdown have been in there since v1. Runs locally, saves to LocalStorage and is always in a partially broken state because I add more things than those I fix: https://github.com/rberenguel/weave
And a couple recent-ish updates (sadly twitter, because I use it as throw-devlog-there):
I did another take on this, that extends Markdown links to include types (like triples, like Semantic Mediawiki) called "mdld". It's quite powerful but I left it at a good-enough stage for my uses. https://github.com/vid/mdld
Really nice job, the emphasis on local+live execution is much appreciated.
I’ve spent some time working on something like this and ended up in a Turing tarpit, I hope you are able to avoid that fate.
The questions I let myself avoid for too long was, who is my user, and what are they trying to accomplish? How technical are they?
Once I answered those (on year 2, after running out of money) I built the same capabilities into a very different offering. Still with the goals of local, live, executable docs, but you wouldn’t recognize it.
Thanks! That's why I posted this here to see if people would resonate with this or not... I've only worked a couple of weeks on this and I had the same questions!
Can I ask what you ended up building? Is there a website for it?
This is a great concept. I'd love for this to be a part of a notetaking solution that I can run locally.
Curious what your long term plans are.
I am also curious if it supports taking (entire) tables as inputs and creating derived tables from them which can then be presented as chart etc. That would be really powerful.
I was trying to get a sense of what people like and find useful.
Your suggestions and comments are helping to figure that out.
I am planning to add support for entire tables, like one coming from a gSheet,
and then present data from it. But not there yet, if you have suggestions, please add them to the feedback form
https://forms.gle/A8Q8WAG8zj4sLvwQ7
I'm not knocking it. At first glance this reminds me of a notebook like Jupyter. Was that an inspiration here? Also, how would you say this stacks up in terms of sharing these files and/or running them locally? Thanks.
Edit: after seeing this, I kind of wish Jupyter worked with markdown exactly like this. Jupyter's GUI-oriented blocks jammed into my VSCode workspace always felt unnecessarily clunky to me.
The idea was to have a more linear way to express your thoughts and adding calculations. Another big problem for me was that in excel when you want to
create various plots for the same multi-variate problem you have to create a ton of copies of your data and formula.
For sharing files, it could be as simple as sharing a text file. You can also imagine a future where you create something and you only share the nice looking
html view that is still interactive.
Running locally? not a problem, I already tested packaging this into a OSX app and it was like 4MB and has the same functionalities.
I'm one of the founders of Evidence. Tenno looks fantastic, there are a lot of great ideas in there. I also really like what you've done w/ the side-by-side code examples in your docs.
Make sure to always google a name you want to use before using it, to make sure you're not going to get clobbered by someone else's dominant SEO on the word.
It had a combined spreadsheet/word processor. No, not as separate modules like Microsoft Works and so on, but like this, as a single program where documents had both functionalities.
deepmacro, before you created Tenno, did you try Org? It supports plain text spreadsheets[1] in Org documents whose content is marked up using Org syntax[2], which is a lightweight markup language like Markdown but with many more features. If you did try Org, how was it lacking?
Honestly, no. I heard of it but I never used it.
I am sure it has a lot of features that can inspire Tenno, I'll look more into it.
One of the main points here was making it more approachable, but it depends on who the audience is.
I want to commend the developer of Tenno, because this is a great idea and I've thought of it myself in the past.
As the developer of a wiki app of my own, I've been doing block-based (cell-based editors, like Jupyter) editors for literally decades. I've also considered adding calculation capabilities into my CMS so that it becomes a hybrid between a wiki tool and a spreadsheet as well.
Jupyter Notebooks is a nice thing that's got similar capabilities but what the world really needs most is just a simple extension to the Markdown format itself.
So while Tenno may be cool, what's even more important is that the world settle in on a syntax that can embed calculations into markdown. Because the Jupyter file format (although it may be great for what it does) is just too complex for general purpose use in the way Markdown is used.
Really nice project, is there some way we can follow the project to get news / updates? Btw, I live near Tenno lake in Trentino and It's always nice to see local folks sharing their projects, keep it up!
Hi there, thanks!
Send your comments here https://forms.gle/A8Q8WAG8zj4sLvwQ7 and put your email in there, I will definitely reach out with updates.
If you're up to it we could even meet sometimes for a coffee!
Nice! mad nitpick, I feel like the Euro display filter is weird, as it renders "12.25€" whereas I'd expect a Euro value to be displayed "€12.25". I've never seen it with the euro sign at the end in my life! Maybe this is country-dependent?
Another one, the Editable filter is very cool, but every keypress seems to take focus away from the input, making it rather hard to edit a number in practice.
Regardless, I really like this! Of most similar attempts I've seen so far, this seems particularly ergonomic and up my alley. Great job!
Concerning the currency symbol positioning, yes, it is indeed country-dependent. Countries of the Commonwealth usually place the currency sign in front of the figure, but most european do not, and instead place the symbol after the figure.
Thanks! I was always told the dollar is a prefix unit while the euro is not, but perhaps between european countries there are differences in that...
Anyway, yes the editable thing is a known problem that could be fixed by switching to a view mode rather than an edit mode. The problem right now is caused by keeping in sync the edit field and the code on the left side.
The dollar sign isn’t a prefix in many EU countries. It’s so weird to learn that currencies go first. Then again, I still don’t understand a single American measurement either so why wouldn’t it be weird? Seriously, I have no idea what a mile or a feet is. I’ve learned from time to time when I needed to, but I always forget again because it’s just not making any sense to me.
Or maybe it’s bit weird. Do you guys also put something like “ml” in front of numbers? Would it be: “you can buy 10ml of milk for $2”?
I realize making fun of the imperial measurement system is a great internet pastime, but almost everything in America has measurements in both imperial and metric on the packaging. The can of soda I'm looking at says 12 fl oz, and then in parentheses it says 355 ml.
I understand this is a tradition and it is pointless to look for logic here, but I always wandered why dollar sign goes first when all other units go after the number.
I'd have to look more into it, one thing for sure is that Tenno does not try to be something like Jupyter.
The cells execution order is sorted out for you.
Specifically, this brings to mind Observable Framework, which takes the "jupyter-like" UI of observablehq.com and makes a static site generator out of it, where you write Markdown, and add "reactive Javascript" bits to it: https://observablehq.com/framework/. (see https://observablehq.com/framework/javascript specifically)
Note that there's nothing stopping you from embedding the Obervable runtime straight into scripts littered throughout a HTML document, see https://maxbo.me/celine/ (my own work).
Daily Obsidian user here. I often need to do a bit of math or adding numbers in a column, and could be the target market for this, but I'm not sure yet.
I am confused about using Excel as a metaphor, and calling things "cells" -- Excel is all about cells and tables, but actually this is just "assigning variables and doing a bit of math inside of :: these blocks :: like a templating language.
Suggestion: just explain it like that to people?
As a feature request, I often have a list of values (in a column) and want to sum them. It'd be nice if I could write it and have it print the sum in the view/wysiwym mode. Eg:
::
10,000
20,000
5,000
=
total_expenses
::
(maybe it could ignore commas too :) )
Cool work, love seeing things in the markdown space!
I had one more thought about this stuff today. As the developers of Tenno did you consider using some format like back-ticks based (r ``` or r `) where an "r" in front would mean "run" this code, instead of simply display it? That way it would display a normal markdown code (aside from the 'r') in editors that don't support Tenno syntax? Or maybe something in front of the backticks that always renders as invisible, like maybe some kind of XML like <r>?
Very cool! I'm working on something similar but a little more wysiwyg and collaborative (think gdocs meets gsheets rather than word meets excel). Let me know if you want to chat - email in profile
It's interesting that the literal programming mentioned in the description and in the comments is old, but it basically suggests making a text primarily intended for computers more human. What is new here imho is that the idea of extending markdown with programming features is doing the reverse. So, if you have some texts made for humans why not make it more algorithmic in nature. I think this idea might be more influential if we find more cases when it could shine.
1.Support export rendered page to other format,e.g. html,pdf,png,svg
2.The above suggestion is about how to sharing with others.So it's good to procide a way to spread,e.g. every documents made can be viewed from a special url,if you want to make this be a platform.
3.Code blocks hightlighting.Suppose someone want to use teno like juptybook to share their research or other things,code highlight is the key for reading experience.
I opened the docs page, tried editing one of the examples, the page immediately crashed. You may be interested in setting up some error boundaries between your components.
Unexpected Application Error!
Cannot read properties of null (reading 'alternate')
TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'alternate')
at Uh (https://tenno.app/assets/index-y2OkIpP6.js:38:18238)
Yup, still happens. The easiest way to reproduce it to change a title of one of the charts to `title=""` (make sure to type it, not copy-paste). I'm using Safari for macOS if this makes a difference.
- The editable text fields currently lose focus after each keypress
- Error handling will be a hard nut to crack, but currently if you, say, add "a" to an editable textbox that expects a number, the live component reverts to text
- Minimal support for buttons would add a lot for simple interactive charts - something like:
There's something cool here, but I find the custom DSL very counter-intuitive. I'd much rather just type actual TypeScript or even Python than a half-way house.
So I guess while it's cool I think I'd rather just use full Jupyter (especially now it supports Deno)
Yes, a responsive layout it's something I'll tackle in the future, but I think that in 90% of use cases people should use this on a laptop. Check it out again on a laptop if you can!
I think this would be great as an evolution of MDX (https://mdxjs.com/). MDX is already pretty popular for documentation and it plays well with React but unfortunately there is no framework that adds interactivity to MDX which will enable use cases like data applications.
Neat, you might also look at https://speedrun.cc for ideas. It's a slightly different space, it's markdown to wrap tools with UI's instead of to plot things, but the way I enable you to prompt the user and run little bits of javascript might be of interest to you.
I can imagine having a secrets store whose contents can be embedded into API calls, either in the URL or in a header, would be pretty useful.
And looking further ahead, having a way to authenticate users via Okta etc with the usual gubbins of groups and permissions and personal areas and sharing URLs would no doubt give you uptake in corporate areas.
The editable fields within a markdown explainer is really intuitive.
What I'd personally like to see is a better data exploration tab or similar - basically some place that makes it easier to view the cells in use in the doc, and edit them. basically a spreadsheet tab ;)
Yeah, I think using the same concept you did for the charts, use that for the tabular info. I can imagine using those dash's and bars would eventually get annoying to create a decent size table.
Neat little tool. I was looking for Excel in the examples but only saw charts.
For Excel + Word I use coda.io. You can also quickly create equations with sliders for variables to satisfy similar needs as Tenno but I haven't tried charting with it yet.
Vet cool! I've always wanted something like this in my note taking (currently use obsidian), but it being a "webapp" is kinda a deal breaker. I want something that runs and stores my data locally.
Well it's a web app but it's not using anything in the cloud at the moment, I experimented with packaging it in an app for Mac and works nice.
If more people wanted it this could definitely be converted in something running locally where you can store .md files in your computer.
Didn't know about this! Will look into it, one nice thing here is that you do not need "ordering" like in imperative programming when you define your cells.
Is that possible too in Obsidian? Or perhaps it's not useful...
I wonder whether something similar could be achieved with NuxtJs. It has something similar, where it allows you to refer to vuejs components from markdown and parametrize them.
I was hesitant to call it a variable because most people that only use excel are not going to be familiar with that concept. Suggestion for other names?
It would be helpful to have a built-in bignum type. Excel’s usage of float is performant, but it is also a mistake. A complex number type would also be nice to have.
Excel, but linear, without the reference mess. It looks cool for mocking up dashboards. Some form of grid with nested documents could make it more useful.
+1 this! I think writing helps you create a narrative that disambiguates the mess you can create in Excel. It also forces you to think more about what you do.
Good suggestions! Thanks
I feel like disabling editing on mobile entirely might be going too far.
It's obviously your project, so you're free to do whatever you want, but if you prefer focusing on read only mode on phones, maybe you could consider a full screen/toggle mode instead (not split whatsoever - neither vertical nor horizontal), that let's you select editing or viewing mode - and it defaults to off / viewing?
Right, something that's potentially difficult with Jupyter is sharing something that looks nice with non technical folks where they can easily change values and see the result change immediately without having to execute cells.
Yeah, at the moment I only have line charts but I can add other charts using ChartJS.
I also think it could be useful to share some initial prototypes with less technical folks.
Sorry, but Excel is so great and the most loved software in the world because every user intuitively understands that the cells can be edited "right where they are".
The markdown abstraction is nice, and probably has many usecases, but it's just not a hybrid of Word and Excel because it introduces an abstract language to describe cells and words.
I think having to use a tool different than excel is hard because
people have been used to that type of UI for 40 years.
The problem I have is that once you go beyond a simple thing it becomes messy
and you never know what you are dealing with.
The way you present things graphically and they way you organize data
to perform computations are tangled, making hard to read IMO.
no, the real reason is the super wide range of things you can do in 3 clicks that other solution would require you to download external libraries and plugins and/or spend hours implementing it. People can be productive immediately and they never have to learn how to code or waste time configuring the interface and finding third party add-ons.
Simple stuff that you do everyday like sorting data and removing duplicates is probably not difficult to implement by an experienced programmer (eg. in python), but excel has it ready for you and it's a 2 click operation that a complete beginner can figure out on their own with no training, no coding skills and no documentation.
It's the same with Matlab, engineers don't pay for access to the m language, they pay for the toolboxes and the thousands of small QoL details in the UI like importing your data with a quick Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V.
Thank you for sharing Tenno with the HN community! It's always exciting to see new tools that enhance productivity and bridge the gap between document creation and computational analysis.
That being said, if you want this to be useful for people in general, not just programmers:
- People like WYSIWIG. Markdown and the split-pane view seems to be something only programmers like. So I'd suggest being able to do everything, or mostly everything, directly in the rendered/HTML panel. (Maybe the Markdown panel is for power users only)
- This is great for working with individual calculations, but a lot (most?) of spreadsheet use is about applying formulas to whole rows, columns, and tables of values. I see you support basic tables, but they're a huge pain to encode/format/edit in Markdown, and I don't see any ability to support things like 200 rows x 5 columns and do things like calculate sums and averages
So I think there's a ton of potential here! But I think WYSIWIG and easy tabular data support are going to be key here for broader usage. While the kinds of programmers this seems aimed at now, are already using Jupyter notebooks and Matplotlib for this kind of thing. (Like, when you describe "why did I build this", I don't understand why you didn't just fire up a Google Colab notebook.)
I want to make it such that you can code on the left and then hide everything and share that with non technical folks. That's why I did not use a Colab, creating something interactive with it (and I did that quite a lot in the past) it's a bit of a PITA.
The second problem has had good attempts in the recent years, but no single web application can beat excel in terms of data tables (while not 100% relevant anymore, I really like the super light introduction here from Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg )
There's also the fact that if this is supposed to become more than a design exploration, it might be useful to focus on what this can do that spreadsheets can't - a WYSIWYG editor for spreadsheets is just a spreadsheet.
And I definitely think there's something good here, and that is not a spreadsheet or a colab notebook. It's worth digging into what that might be.
It's basically a pyramid problem:
1 programmer will program all the things
2 power users will create all the forms from pieces of the programmers documents
999+ will use the output and never care about any of the rest
There's just minimal middle ground, and the only answer is to cater to all three but in Different ways
And a couple recent-ish updates (sadly twitter, because I use it as throw-devlog-there):
- https://x.com/berenguel/status/1837917590804451378?s=46&t=jc...
- https://x.com/berenguel/status/1799770200310726731?s=46&t=jc...
- https://x.com/berenguel/status/1796917242791113118?s=46&t=jc...
I’ve spent some time working on something like this and ended up in a Turing tarpit, I hope you are able to avoid that fate.
The questions I let myself avoid for too long was, who is my user, and what are they trying to accomplish? How technical are they?
Once I answered those (on year 2, after running out of money) I built the same capabilities into a very different offering. Still with the goals of local, live, executable docs, but you wouldn’t recognize it.
Can I ask what you ended up building? Is there a website for it?
Curious what your long term plans are.
I am also curious if it supports taking (entire) tables as inputs and creating derived tables from them which can then be presented as chart etc. That would be really powerful.
I am planning to add support for entire tables, like one coming from a gSheet, and then present data from it. But not there yet, if you have suggestions, please add them to the feedback form https://forms.gle/A8Q8WAG8zj4sLvwQ7
Edit: after seeing this, I kind of wish Jupyter worked with markdown exactly like this. Jupyter's GUI-oriented blocks jammed into my VSCode workspace always felt unnecessarily clunky to me.
For sharing files, it could be as simple as sharing a text file. You can also imagine a future where you create something and you only share the nice looking html view that is still interactive.
Running locally? not a problem, I already tested packaging this into a OSX app and it was like 4MB and has the same functionalities.
Soulver - https://soulver.app
Notepad, meet calculator...
Soulver is a natural language notepad calculator app for the Mac, iPad & iPhone.
It is a better way to work things out than a traditional calculator, and a more lightweight tool for working through problems than a spreadsheet.
Here's an example from a real user:
https://x.com/hisaac/status/1355720844929019909
Here's our launch HN in case you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781
Happy to chat anytime. adam at evidence.dev
(( Tenno is also a Japanese word usually translated as "emperor". ))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Z88
It had a combined spreadsheet/word processor. No, not as separate modules like Microsoft Works and so on, but like this, as a single program where documents had both functionalities.
deepmacro, before you created Tenno, did you try Org? It supports plain text spreadsheets[1] in Org documents whose content is marked up using Org syntax[2], which is a lightweight markup language like Markdown but with many more features. If you did try Org, how was it lacking?
[1] https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html
[2] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-syntax.html
As the developer of a wiki app of my own, I've been doing block-based (cell-based editors, like Jupyter) editors for literally decades. I've also considered adding calculation capabilities into my CMS so that it becomes a hybrid between a wiki tool and a spreadsheet as well.
Jupyter Notebooks is a nice thing that's got similar capabilities but what the world really needs most is just a simple extension to the Markdown format itself.
So while Tenno may be cool, what's even more important is that the world settle in on a syntax that can embed calculations into markdown. Because the Jupyter file format (although it may be great for what it does) is just too complex for general purpose use in the way Markdown is used.
Another one, the Editable filter is very cool, but every keypress seems to take focus away from the input, making it rather hard to edit a number in practice.
Regardless, I really like this! Of most similar attempts I've seen so far, this seems particularly ergonomic and up my alley. Great job!
See the Use section in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_sign
Anyway, yes the editable thing is a known problem that could be fixed by switching to a view mode rather than an edit mode. The problem right now is caused by keeping in sync the edit field and the code on the left side.
Or maybe it’s bit weird. Do you guys also put something like “ml” in front of numbers? Would it be: “you can buy 10ml of milk for $2”?
That's expensive ass milk.
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euroteken
There is no support for table cell expressions though, without which marking it as Excel is wrong.
There is VS Code extension I use now: https://github.com/cescript/MarkdownFormula
Do you consider adding something like that? Any way to use this locally? Is this going to be FOSS or no?
Also need to find a nice and easy way to deal with local tables, I'll look into the extension you suggested.
I am personally not interested in anything beyond my computer.
I am confused about using Excel as a metaphor, and calling things "cells" -- Excel is all about cells and tables, but actually this is just "assigning variables and doing a bit of math inside of :: these blocks :: like a templating language.
Suggestion: just explain it like that to people?
As a feature request, I often have a list of values (in a column) and want to sum them. It'd be nice if I could write it and have it print the sum in the view/wysiwym mode. Eg:
:: 10,000 20,000 5,000 = total_expenses ::
(maybe it could ignore commas too :) )
Cool work, love seeing things in the markdown space!
1.Support export rendered page to other format,e.g. html,pdf,png,svg 2.The above suggestion is about how to sharing with others.So it's good to procide a way to spread,e.g. every documents made can be viewed from a special url,if you want to make this be a platform. 3.Code blocks hightlighting.Suppose someone want to use teno like juptybook to share their research or other things,code highlight is the key for reading experience.
It's not identical to what you're doing, but there's considerable overlap and possibly some food for thought.
[0]https://medium.com/@shijotck/automating-tasks-with-semantic-...
- The editable text fields currently lose focus after each keypress
- Error handling will be a hard nut to crack, but currently if you, say, add "a" to an editable textbox that expects a number, the live component reverts to text
- Minimal support for buttons would add a lot for simple interactive charts - something like:
There's something cool here, but I find the custom DSL very counter-intuitive. I'd much rather just type actual TypeScript or even Python than a half-way house.
So I guess while it's cool I think I'd rather just use full Jupyter (especially now it supports Deno)
Still an interesting project & thanks for sharing
And looking further ahead, having a way to authenticate users via Okta etc with the usual gubbins of groups and permissions and personal areas and sharing URLs would no doubt give you uptake in corporate areas.
There are lots of reports and documents that should be this instead of static Word files.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
The editable fields within a markdown explainer is really intuitive.
What I'd personally like to see is a better data exploration tab or similar - basically some place that makes it easier to view the cells in use in the doc, and edit them. basically a spreadsheet tab ;)
For Excel + Word I use coda.io. You can also quickly create equations with sliders for variables to satisfy similar needs as Tenno but I haven't tried charting with it yet.
It would be great if it switched to top-bottom instead of left-right layout under certain width and/or aspect ratio.
Is that possible too in Obsidian? Or perhaps it's not useful...
It's pretty convinent
Cool stuff!
It's obviously your project, so you're free to do whatever you want, but if you prefer focusing on read only mode on phones, maybe you could consider a full screen/toggle mode instead (not split whatsoever - neither vertical nor horizontal), that let's you select editing or viewing mode - and it defaults to off / viewing?
(Anyway, great project engineering-wise!)
The problem I have is that once you go beyond a simple thing it becomes messy and you never know what you are dealing with. The way you present things graphically and they way you organize data to perform computations are tangled, making hard to read IMO.
Simple stuff that you do everyday like sorting data and removing duplicates is probably not difficult to implement by an experienced programmer (eg. in python), but excel has it ready for you and it's a 2 click operation that a complete beginner can figure out on their own with no training, no coding skills and no documentation.
It's the same with Matlab, engineers don't pay for access to the m language, they pay for the toolboxes and the thousands of small QoL details in the UI like importing your data with a quick Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V.
Citation needed.
(actually, I love pimping emacs)