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Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback

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

#191

Post by VectorLock »

willtim wrote: post #142
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.

Python is extremely permissive and flexible, even for a dynamic language - a trait that makes it easy to learn and easy to throw something together quickly. But when building software at scale, we need restrictions. For example: static types, immutability, pure functions, total functions, algebraic laws. It is restrictions such as these that give us the power to reason about code and the ability to compose it at scal…

I know plenty of skilled programmers who would recommend Python for projects at any scale, and just as many who do it every day.

No true scottsman etc.

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

#192

Post by m_mueller »

_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/

Haha, I love the little jab at Microsoft's NIH syndrome by suggesting bing search results - seems though that by looking at Python they're slowly getting over that.

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

#193

Post by ultrasounder »

sheetjs wrote: post #121
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.

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)

Wow!! Sheetjs looks cool! What kinds of math libraries do you support inlieu of Scipy /numpy. I am looking to mostly do some Exploratory Data Analysis

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

#194

Post by floki999 »

Unless the Excel team somehow integrates Python with the existing GUI design tool already found in Excel, it wouldn’t bring anything new to the table. There are already existing solutions such as DataNitro, which allow to code Python macros and functions and make use of Numpy, Pandas and Matplotlib. Microsoft is so far behind the curve it’s not funny. Their integration of either Python or IronPython in Visual Studio has been a mess for years.

See Http://www.datanitro.com

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

#195

Post by yesenadam »

deepnotderp wrote: post #36
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.

Try Cython, the benefits of both, IMO.

At last! hehe I was wondering why no-one mentioned Cython. Did I miss the part where everyone learned why it's not a good idea? For me it's the best of both C and Python worlds.

Write a Python program. Compile it as a Cython program. (Already faster, with no changes.) Add C types to the speed-critical parts. (Up to many 100s of times faster than Python)

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

#196

Post by quickthrower2 »

johnthomas00 wrote: post #101

Does not M$ have a track record of getting everyone on board and then murdering everything in site. I mean it sounds good, but I don't trust M$. Maybe they have changed, but I'm not yet convinced.

Embrace and extend python? I think not.

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

#197

Post by willhslade »

logicallee wrote: post #48

here's my feedback: embed sqlite in it and you're done. Nobody needs any more servers, you can literally replace a hundred thousand dollar "big data" center and team of PhD data scientists with a business school dropout. And you will get prettier, more actionable results.

Can everyone read this and vote this up in the survey? This is the real LPT.

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

#198

Post by tkinz27 »

zoom6628 wrote: post #178

Much as i would love for the power of Python in Excel it is important that whatever is done is consistent across the office experience. Some of us old enough to remember the multiple versions of VB-whatever across Excel, Word, Access and that in itself was a blow to productivity. Yes they should choose Python, and in the process decide if it will be Python with a .Net library (standard and core as seperate libs pleas…

The office 365 support could be implemented using the jupyter kernel protocols rather than transpiling to javascript. That would give them a consistent behavior across desktop and web and even open the door to support more languages in the future if they really wanted to.

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

#199

Post by 75dvtwin »

1) performance, including multi-sheet setups, should be better than the current Macros.

For maintainability reasons, in one personal experience, I moved in-cell macros to VBA, and saw significant degradation in performance (my excel was calculating financial instrument attributes, based on raw input data (store in separate workbook with the same sheet)).

So my ask would be that Python-based scripting would not just be the same as VBA in speed, but faster than in-cell macros.

2) There needs to be easy-to-use capability, to be able create XLS files with the new language macros, from within other programs. So that the new Python modules can be written out together with data from within other programming languages (and MS-supported libraries to replace or augment something like openpyxl, and similar libs for other langauages will be much welcomed)

3) I think Python as a choice for Excel is a good idea. It should be a language with 'duck typing', and that has support for Data Frames, Reactive programming. And in that light, I would like to see that Python's Pandas are first class citizens in being able to address Excel cells, participate in graphing, pivoting, etc.

4) Version control within the excel file... may be this is going beyond the original ask... but I think the spirit of introducing Python into excel, is around better SDLC/reusability. And so local and remote version control models should be supported.

5) I personally do not care if other MS Office tools (eg MS word) support Python. Would be nice.. but for my needs, this is not relevant.

6) a type-checking mode to be able to say, this Module will type check the data it uses... at run time.

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

#200

Post by mixedCase »

andybak wrote: post #143
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.

Every sufficiently large statically-typed application will contain an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, verbose implementation of half of a decent dynamic language. (I too enjoy a good pseudo-Greenspun) More seriously something I've been pondering a lot recently watching the old pendulum swing back towards an enthusiasm for explicit typing is this: * The advantages of static type systems are obvious and easy…

I think I've never really got the point of a good type system until I started using Elm and then wandered into the rest of the ML world, learning the so called "Type-Driven Development" method.

After some time doing that a Java project came up, so I grabbed Lombok, Vavr and started writing Java as if it was just another ML (immutability first, paying attention to side effects and so on) and the whole thing made sense. More sense than all those years of OOP teachings. The code was easy to debug, easy to reason about, easy to change. And it was Java. And that just stunned me for life.

Then of course, I started using TypeScript for React development and giggled like a little girl every time I had to refactor something, for I KNEW that it was very unlikely I'd have to stare at the debugger for long periods of time in a wild goose chase like I often had to with plain JS.

But the trick was to learn the way of doing things in the languages that really guide you towards that path.

I can definitely recommend that you try Elm if you're into frontend development, or something like F# if you want native. As far as docs go, the Elm guide and fsharpforfunandprofit.com are both great; the latter I can recommend regardless of your language choice for making typed functional programming make sense. I can also recommend the book Type-Driven Development with Idris, which has also been an invaluable resource to really understand that way of doing things.

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