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Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#71

Post by mcypher »

caioariede wrote: post #29
gregschlom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

Python is strongly typed, and Python 3 annotations with tools like MyPy brings static type checks.

Unfortunately, MyPy doesn't work well with libraries or third party packages and treats external objects as `ANY` type. You can work around this with stubs but it's not fun writing type annotations for third party objects / functions. typeshed exists for the standard library and various popular third party libraries[1] to solve this very problem.

[1] https://github.com/python/typeshed

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#73

Post by cm2187 »

agumonkey wrote: post #41

python isn't the bestest thing in the world but it's still a massive win for them, and a massive win for excel users. VBA had too many shortcomings and led to loads of scalability problems even for medium size apps.

To its defense VBA litterally hasn't been updated in 20 years. It's hard to hold a 90s language to the 2010s standards.

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#74

Post by jpetersonmn »

bogomipz wrote: post #69
gregschlom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

>"Python is great for scripting and for small projects but ..." You mean like Dropbox, Evernote, Ansible, OpenStack etc.

Or Google...

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#75

Post by smortaz »

cm2187 wrote: post #63

Might be worth reminding everyone of a dead Microsoft project called VSTA, which was basically a live .net IDE embedded in Office. Effectively a mini visual studio inside any office application, where you can write any .net language. This would have allowed people to script in VB.net, C# or F#. Microsoft killed the project before it shipped (but licensed VSTA as a scripting tool for third party apps for a while). It'…

Good point that the tooling would've been awesome. However, I don't think .net would have spawned the rich ecosystem of Python pkgs that we enjoy today. And /that/ is a huge part of the whole Python value prop. From astronomy to finance to bioinformatics to ML & everything in between, there's a pkg for that. We even did sponsored a port of numpy+scipy to .Net (via Anaconda). At the end of the day, there were just too many corner cases & too many pkgs to port for it to make sense.

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#76

Post by PhrosTT »

stestagg wrote: post #37
gregschlom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

Last time I saw the Bank of America python codebase, it had ~6 million lines of code, was worked on by about 4,000 developers, and ran some core, performance critical functionality. Python programming is an aesthetic that needs learning. Many of the worst written, and least maintainable python codebases I've seen are by programmers/teams coming from "proper" languages and don't think they have to learn how to write i…

Wait that "Quartz" monstrosity is still around?

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#77

Post by ninjakeyboard »

gregschlom wrote: post #17
blhack wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aren't programmers Also extremely popular with people who are programmers and need to do things. Sorry, this is a frustration of mine lately. Python is a fantastic introductory language. It's also a fantastic general purpose language. Newbies get turned off of it because it feels too easy, and they know that "real" programming is supposed to be hard.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

Or at least a compiler to catch foot shooting (I used to agree 100% but elixir sort of changed my mind)

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#78

Post by agumonkey »

cm2187 wrote: post #73
agumonkey wrote: post #41

python isn't the bestest thing in the world but it's still a massive win for them, and a massive win for excel users. VBA had too many shortcomings and led to loads of scalability problems even for medium size apps.

To its defense VBA litterally hasn't been updated in 20 years. It's hard to hold a 90s language to the 2010s standards.

Fair enough. Although the jury is still out about it's value in the 90s too :p

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#79

Post by cm2187 »

Lxr wrote: post #28
gregschlom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

Instagram would disagree with you. Seriously, Python is an absolute pleasure for managing large web projects and the lack of static typing has never been an issue for my company (spend the time writing tests instead!)

That's one thing I don't understand. The argument I hear against static typing is that it's too much work to write all this type metadata. But if you have to make up the lack of compiler checks with lots of tests for things that wouldn't require tests in a static language, we are not saving any work.

Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

#80

Post by dragonwriter »

gregschlom wrote: post #17
blhack wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aren't programmers Also extremely popular with people who are programmers and need to do things. Sorry, this is a frustration of mine lately. Python is a fantastic introductory language. It's also a fantastic general purpose language. Newbies get turned off of it because it feels too easy, and they know that "real" programming is supposed to be hard.

I disagree. Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.

> but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects

Python is strongly typed and has an available static typechecker, so, even if this is true, it doesn't rule out Python for this use case.

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