Sketch of possible text representations of a getguesstimate.com spreadsheet

gistfile1.txt

Naive thinking of ways to represent @getguesstimate spreadsheets as text....
Using http://www.getguesstimate.com/models/314 as an example

in YML

count_meltdowns:
  label: Number of meltdowns  
  formula: normal(0,2)   # distributions use function notation?

minutes_per_meltdown:
  label: Minutes per meltdown    # if label is skipped, split/capitalize node id to save on typing
  formula: uniform(3,13)
  
total_meltdown_time:
  formula: count_meltdowns * minutes_per_meltdown   # can also force everthing into function notation
  reasoning: |
    some explanation here
    yml allows multiline strings
    and you get parsing of these for free


S expressions or Clojure syntax could be fun too, but not as (general) user-friendly, maybe

(defnode number-meltdowns
  :label "Number of meltdowns"
  (uniform-dist 0 2))

(defnode minutes-per-meltdown
  :label "Minutes per meltdown"
  :formula (uniform-dist 3 13))

(defnode total-meltdown-time
  (* number-meltdowns minutes-per-meltdown))

Now that I think about it, why did you originally want this feature? If the goal is to have text files that can be converted into Guesstimate models, that's a lot easier than having ones that are interoperable (can be converted back and forth). There's already a private API and we've had someone else try it; with that we could have a lot more flexibility for anyone to make their own format method and have that convert to a model.

Agreed that it would make sense to have data as part of other files, that could work.

One limitation of this is that it would make dependencies difficult; the longer term vision for Guesstimate is for it to be a bit like a wiki, where some models could reference data from other models or the internet. This makes it much less repo like, but there may be some clever ways to get much of the best of both worlds. Programmers have a lot of ways of dealing with dependencies, but it would definitely be a fair bit of work to do all that dependency management for something like this.