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

151–160 of 280 posts

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

#151

Post by rspeer »

Yuioup wrote: post #116

As well as agreeing to this, I would add the following: * I would support both Python 2 and Python 3. Yes I know that the push to Python 3 is ongoing but there are a lot more libraries to be found for 2. Don't bother with IronPython. * I would integrate pip or whatever package manager Python uses these days so that people can download their own modules and use them in the Excel sheets. Not only that, the packages sho…

> I would support both Python 2 and Python 3.

Nah. They can spare a lot of pain and confusion by not having two different Pythons with different sets of libraries in Excel, and they have this opportunity because they don't have to support people's old Python 2 spreadsheets. There aren't old Python 2 spreadsheets.

The libraries that are stuck on Python 2 really don't seem relevant here. There aren't many of them anymore [1], and I don't think people will be trying to run graphite-web or some busted old OpenID provider in their spreadsheet.

(I originally used Fabric and Twisted as examples in the above, but hey, those are on Python 3 now. Also not things you'd be likely to use in a spreadsheet.)

[1] http://py3readiness.org/

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

#153

Post by mark-r »

Yuioup wrote: post #116

As well as agreeing to this, I would add the following: * I would support both Python 2 and Python 3. Yes I know that the push to Python 3 is ongoing but there are a lot more libraries to be found for 2. Don't bother with IronPython. * I would integrate pip or whatever package manager Python uses these days so that people can download their own modules and use them in the Excel sheets. Not only that, the packages sho…

How do you sandbox Python when pip can install any arbitrary package?

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

#154

Post by dragonwriter »

auxym wrote: post #61
smortaz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for the Excel team to decide. My personal hope is that they'll offer as a base: * Python 3 * Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Altair, ... * Pythonic bindings for Excel APIs (sheets, etc etc) * VSCode's Python Editor + Debugger built in * Some sort of conda based env/pkg mgmt * Right-click, "Open in Jupyter" (data/code) *

Transparent access to Excel tables as Pandas Dataframes would be so, so very awesome. I mean, MS implemented these really nice Tables in excel, but then left us no way to easily query them with something like SQL.

Well, there is PowerPivot...

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

#155

Post by cgb223 »

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.

I bet thats why so many AI, Backends, ML, and IoT projects are written in Python

because it has no long term potential

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

#156

Post by cessor »

I use PANDAS in Jupyter Notebooks a lot. Sometimes, exploring large data frames can get tedious and I find myself loading up excel to explore and browse around, usually when deciding how to normalize or clean things up. Using Excel as a PANDAS Gui this way would be really great, but also using Python to script excel would be useful. And I guess I would love to call bokeh / seaborn after making an excel cell selection.

I am looking forward to what a Python & Excel marriage will look like.

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

#157

Post by throwaway7645 »

_e wrote: post #5

Dear Excel team, Take a look at the top three results for "excel python" on bing.com for some great ideas on how to incorporate python into excel. --- 1.) https://www.python-excel.org 2.) https://www.pyxll.com/ 3.) https://www.xlwings.org/

Also DataNitro

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

#158

Post by gh02t »

Yuioup wrote: post #116

As well as agreeing to this, I would add the following: * I would support both Python 2 and Python 3. Yes I know that the push to Python 3 is ongoing but there are a lot more libraries to be found for 2. Don't bother with IronPython. * I would integrate pip or whatever package manager Python uses these days so that people can download their own modules and use them in the Excel sheets. Not only that, the packages sho…

Most of the big data science libraries are sunsetting support by 2020, so I don't think supporting Python 2 is a great idea. It used to be true that there were lots of libs stuck on Python 2, but I'm struggling to think of any major ones that'd be relevant to Excel that haven't moved forwards nowadays. No way it'd be worth the confusion of having two different versions of Python and the documentation headache that'd be. There's a case to be made for keeping Python 2 around for stuff like internal software, but you're not gonna be running that in Excel.

http://www.python3statement.org/ <- look at the list of projects dropping support... NumPy, MPL, Pandas, SymPy etc.

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

#159

Post by taspeotis »

cm2187 wrote: post #147
canadianwriter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and the fact that the vast majority of companies use Office...

Which is also why it is surprising that Microsoft has spent so little time on office in 20 years. Outside of changing the colors regularly, there has been very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016. And opening the VBA IDE is a nasty reminder. I'd argue large companies are still running Windows because of Office. The cost of retraining people, redesigning all of these user processes…

Between 2003 and 2016 they took some massive desktop applications and put versions of them on the web and mobile...
Post reply on HN