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Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

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Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#231
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that VBA will finally die? Please tell me that VBA will finally die.

As much as I can imagine MS would love to kill VBA it would be a major loss of business if they did. Oil and Gas lives in the stuff and would probably even sue MS if VBA died. That said could it be getting a much needed fixup... probably. I suspect the same is true of COM plugins.

I'm in Oil and Gas app dev, we are .net with no VBA. I guess I'm lucky.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#232
post #209

Re: the original tweet JavaScript is a real language now. It's powerful and performant and uses modern paradigms, in addition to its sheer relevance. That said, I am glad I was taught using C++ in college. Not because I plan to ever write an OS or DBMS, but because it taught me valuable lessons about pointers, how memory is managed, how arrays and lists differ, and other computing fundamentals that still inform you w…

This is true, but people like the orginal tweeter often pretend that this learning order is somehow the only "real" way to do things. I don't see why it isn't equally as valid to learn high-level concepts first and then learn the gory details later. I'm confused why there seems to be such a large number of low-level people so stubbornly insisting their order is the right one.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I threw billions of dollars of vested interest at Python/Ruby/COBOL/(insert language of your choice) we can probably make those run at JS speeds as well. Does that solve the fundamental drawbacks of the languages? Nope. No it does not. JavaScript is particularly egregious because of it's weird behaviour about types and coercion and you know, just silently failing, behaviour that I wouldn't want going on in any pro…

every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion, that's simply the nature of the beast. sure wish i knew what you are talking about w/r/t "silently failing". JS has working exceptions just like 99% of widely used languages. I'm very glad that you've been omniscient enough to determine what "proper" parallel support is, though. How's that working out for you? Meanwhile, those of us using Ja…

> I'm very glad that you've been omniscient enough to determine what "proper" parallel support is, though. How's that working out for you? Meanwhile, those of us using JavaScript simply run one process per core

Yeah, and I can do the same thing in Python, and it will be equally as lame: both languages are fundamentally single-threaded.

You act as if JS has all problems solved: Erlang/Elixir/Golang have far superior async & parallel stories and will happily thrash JS/Node in performance and efficiency.

How’s it working out for me? Well I do a lot of stuff in Haskell and Rust now, so pretty great actually.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#234
post #231
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I can imagine MS would love to kill VBA it would be a major loss of business if they did. Oil and Gas lives in the stuff and would probably even sue MS if VBA died. That said could it be getting a much needed fixup... probably. I suspect the same is true of COM plugins.

I'm in Oil and Gas app dev, we are .net with no VBA. I guess I'm lucky.

Dev in finance here, VBA gets used more than I care to think about.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#235
post #231
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I can imagine MS would love to kill VBA it would be a major loss of business if they did. Oil and Gas lives in the stuff and would probably even sue MS if VBA died. That said could it be getting a much needed fixup... probably. I suspect the same is true of COM plugins.

I'm in Oil and Gas app dev, we are .net with no VBA. I guess I'm lucky.

I dealt with it peripherally in my last job. Apparently the only reason Office has a 64bit version at all is Oil and Gas was causing Excel to run out of ram and demanded it. We were developing a COM addin, and we had clients complain that we broke some of their VBA they were using (turned out it was another VBA addin they were using that wasn't doing proper error handling). But it was definitely common for us to see clients that were deep into VBA.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think it’s extremely unlikely MS is announcing an new native code compiler for JavaScript, something I’m not sure anyone knows how to do with reasonable performance, with a Tweet this casual.

Web Views with native API's. So not truly native compilation.

[deleted]

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing they're just going to ship an Electron app and they won't be different codebases any more.

On Windows 10, they will target WinRT on UWP, with Fluent Design UI. Not Electron.

Wrong https://twitter.com/thelarkinn/status/1006761134395834368?s=...

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#238
My hunch is probably there will be 2 versions maintained separately like visual studio and vs code. The version built in javascript will probably be free for personal usage, can have lesser features and probably fight for marketshare against google drive, libreoffice etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they even keep the source open. PR and market wise, this would be a great move.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#240

Hi there, original tweeter here. Just to clarify: no one said when this work would land, simply that we are working on it! Sorry to disappoint XD, but I guess blame the OP.

Does this mean that VBA will finally die? Please tell me that VBA will finally die.

There are COBOL programs still running. I wouldn't get your hopes up.
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