Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 280 posts

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

#131

Post by willtim »

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…

And it appears to be a recruiter goldmine, the staff turnover is significantly high (so I am told). A codebase of this size with no static type checking is not going to be fun.

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

#132

Post by bpicolo »

nightski wrote: post #45
Lxr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

Yes let's waste our companies time and money by writing tests for things the compiler could guarantee for free!

Most of it is caught as incidentals of tests you have to write either way.

There's room for both paradigms - it's kinda silly to argue strict superiority of either because there's just no empirical evidence that having static typing or not drastically changes bug count.

If you take a look at some of the studies out there that do exist (which there are, admittedly, few, and it's a fundamentally tough thing to measure), e.g. [0], it usually tends to be the case the both typed and untyped languages show up in the realm of "least likely to produce bugs"

[0] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~filkov/papers/lang_github.pdf

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

cm2187 wrote: post #93
ribosometronome wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by xapata »

jnwatson wrote: post #115
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people writing VBA code for excel are only informal programmers. For example, I never took a CS course in my life but learned VBA and programming on the job. Since then I've learned python and other languages but when I'm doing a home project or something I always come back to python. It's just so easy. I was working on a macro the other day in Excel, it took me a couple hours to get it all working but I'm prett…

Unfortunately, there are several companies and hundreds of divisions of companies run entirely out of excel spreadsheets.

And integration with Python will be an enormous help for them.

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

#136

Post by sidlls »

nick238 wrote: post #129
mixedCase wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(spend the time writing tests instead!) Every sufficiently large test suite will contain an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a proper type system.

What's the point in testing types if the tests that check it works pass?

No, the claim is that the tests that "check it works" are really testing the types (as an ad-hoc type checker) and wouldn't need to be written if a sufficiently strict static type system were used instead.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

pmontra wrote: post #130
nightski wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I work with Python and Ruby (some Elixir.) They are strongly typed in the same way. I hardly think about types. The code just works. The only scenario in which I have to stop and think is when I get some input, for example some JSON. Is that value I have to add to this counter a string or an integer? I can cast it to integer and that's it. To be fair, sometimes an integer gets where there should be a string and boom.…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by Godel_unicode »

nightski wrote: post #98
pmontra wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to think about the types for some small pieces of your code where those types matter. That's what hints are for. Python lets you, through type hints, only care about the typing in those small cases where it actually matters, and ignore them the rest of the time.

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

#139

Post by vanderZwan »

euske wrote: post #134

It would be great for a scripting language, but for field functions I would have preferred something that's more akin to FRP-oriented language (e.g. Scheme).

Excel itself is functional and reactive already, wouldn't adding an FRP language on top of that be a bit superfluous? Check out Felienne Hermans' work if you haven't already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

http://www.felienne.com/publications

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

bpicolo wrote: post #126
sheetjs wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually surprising the Excel team isn't considering TypeScript. TS is a modern language that they control, gives them an out for eventual browser compatibility, and they've already built great tooling (better than the visual studio tooling for python)

> eventual browser compatibility You'd be hardpressed to reinvent excel in a browser. Sheets is a big, advanced web app but it doesn't even come close.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN