Ruby is a lot more non-programmer friendly and has an easier syntax if you ask me
Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
91–100 of 280 posts
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#92"NO! I prefer VBA to Python!" Said no one ever :)
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
"50 million cigarette smokers can't be wrong!"
An appeal to popularity is not really a logical fallacy if someone is arguing that something is (effectively) unpopular.
Depends if you define popular by most used or most liked.
Most used: everyone pays taxes. Paying taxes is popular!
A more practical example is javascript. I write some javascript, not because I like it (I hate it), but because that's the only way to make things happen in a browser. Javascript is popular. Does it mean it is liked / a good language?
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#94Earlier 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.
You should have a little bit more experience with Python and you would see how huge systems can be written in it with no problem. It needs a bit more discipline, but above 100k lines software written in any other language would need the same discipline also. (I'm working with 100kloc codebase right now and seen almost 300kloc. That was messy because mostly juniors wrote it :D but still bearable and profitable.)
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#95Earlier 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.
> strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects This is empirically false. There are (of course!) good reasons to consider static typing. But, in my experience, use of static typing has never been a first-order predictor of business or technology success. It's quite possible to build considerable value with, for example, a large Python 2.x code base. A fun, and tangentially related, talk: htt…
That reminds me of Kapital [1] - a valuation and risk analysis system written in Smalltalk at JPMorgan, begun in the early '90s and as far as i know still going; 14,000 classes, 400,000 methods, hojillions of dollars of profit, twenty years in service, zero types:
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#96No love for C#? Imagine the power of LINQ in Excel.
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#97Earlier 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.
> strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects This is empirically false. There are (of course!) good reasons to consider static typing. But, in my experience, use of static typing has never been a first-order predictor of business or technology success. It's quite possible to build considerable value with, for example, a large Python 2.x code base. A fun, and tangentially related, talk: htt…
That's not "empirically false", it's just not empirically true. Static typing is a big boon to software development, and I use Python in my day job.
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes let's waste our companies time and money by writing tests for things the compiler could guarantee for free!
Not for free. You have to think and write types, maybe add some code to cast values between them or implement the same function twice for two different type signatures. Sometimes it still gains time, sometimes it doesn't. Anyway, I doubt that a VBA replacement would need types. The use case is small scripts.
Python is strongly typed. You still have to think about the types. Except now you have to think about them every time you work with the code, not just the first time.
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#99Well python is pretty much already well established but it should be wary of te famous "Embrace Extend Extinguish".
Re: Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback
#100Why not C# ?