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Will VBA Die? (2019)

thespreadsheetguru.com

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Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#131

Post by animalnewbie »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #128
animalnewbie wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a PS1 expert by any means but you have to spend some time with it to appreciate the design decisions. It's a very "wholesomely" designed language. Try eg. The for each parallel construct which made me realize why the output in PS1 behaves how it does.

That's always been the problem for me, I don't use it often enough to become fluent with it.

You're missing out. As a full time Linux user (since a year), PowerShell is by far the best shell out there (once it starts after 5 secs)

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#132

Post by AdamM12 »

clausok wrote: post #109
kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

Your Excel+vba application’s features remind me of when I joined an investment bank in 2000. I had come from an insurance company where I was considered the Excel\vba wizard, and I was impressed, in the extreme, by my new colleagues’ approach to Excel development. Even during the interview process I had realized that, when it came to vba, I was but a babe in the woods. They had auto-updating code (when you “published…

What would the role names be for positions like this at an IB? Been interested in this type of work.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#134

Post by Tarsul »

jrockway wrote: post #89
NeoBasilisk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, I hope we can get past this argument. Learning a new language for rudimentary tasks is not particularly hard. I'm not sure why people decided that JavaScript of all things was what we had to all latch onto.

I have a friend that wanted to learn programming. I suggested Python, but they wanted to go directly into making web apps. I don't think they finished the class. Javascript just has too many weird concepts (what's the difference between null and undefined and false and 0 and "") that distract from the mechanics of learning what a computer program is, and I also think that the desire to make something others can use t…

Since we are in a VBA thread, I'd argue that VBA is a great introduction itself into programming; especially with its macro recorder.

Progamming by clicking (in the spreadsheets) and seeing how the code changes instantly is arguably better for beginners than what normal programming languages usually offer.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#135

Post by imtringued »

tracker1 wrote: post #73
NeoBasilisk wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, I hope we can get past this argument. Learning a new language for rudimentary tasks is not particularly hard. I'm not sure why people decided that JavaScript of all things was what we had to all latch onto.

It kind of won in a lot of ways... biggest package ecosystem. The most developers using it. Highly optimized runtime. Supports the use of OO, Functional and Procedural paradigms. Able to run in the browser for online versions. Cross platform and nearly ubiquitous.

>biggest package ecosystem.

I don't understand how you can be proud of having the most unusable package ecosystem. Sure the numbers are large but can you actually safely use those packages? No, you can't. Just add a single library and you will include a huge amount of transitive dependencies from random package maintainers over which you have no control.

Other languages like Java or Rust have the same problem but this is a problem with exponential impact and NPM is the leader in tree depth. Having a 10 layer deep dependency tree is far worse than a 7 layer deep dependency tree. When I look at the dependency tree of my own projects more than 50% of the libraries are first party and from a vendor with a good reputation. (spring, apache commons, tomcat). The rest are less trust worthy but each project has a small opensource community that consists of more than just a random guy that may randomly throw emotional fits like in the leftpad scenario.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#136

Post by non-entity »

jbeam wrote: post #65
dokka wrote: post #27

I'm working on an excell addin right now. It doesn't use VBA (it uses microsoft interop libs for .NET) And I have zero interest in using VBA, but I will admit, it would have been much easier to do this project in VBA instead of C#. Debugging would have been easier. I could debug inside the VBA code-behind instead of Attaching to the excel process in Visual Studio. Deployment would have been easier. I could make an .x…

I’m the other way. Started a large project in VBA once, jumped over to C# interop and never looked back. I found the libraries to map fairly well to the same named functions in VBA when it came to worksheet manipulation. My biggest issue was that the interop has quite a bit of latency. You really want to accomplish as much in one call as you can (i.e. read whole ranges into an array instead of looping through cell by…

I was working on a small program that originally used the C# interop and found the latency pretty bad as well. For a small document, it was taking like 4 or 5 seconds to do what we wanted (dont remember exactly what that was atm). Eventually, I used some OpenXML library Microsft offered that was basically LINQ to XML with some types / extensions and found something interesting:

On smaller documents, the OpenXML manipulation blew the COM interop out of the water in terms of speed, but with larger documents (hundreds of thousands of rows), I think the COM interop was either faster or at least just as fast.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#137

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

sebazzz wrote: post #93
kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

Problem is that VBA in its current shape doesn't work for webbased Excel. Microsoft started with attempting to support Javascript based add-ins [0]. However, they those are of course light years behind in terms of API support. Never even mind that on the desktop Excel the javascript runs in the Internet Explorer engine (of all things, not even the EdgeHTML engine). [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-…

It isnt the end of the world having different support on different platforms.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#138

Post by cc81 »

clausok wrote: post #109
kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

Your Excel+vba application’s features remind me of when I joined an investment bank in 2000. I had come from an insurance company where I was considered the Excel\vba wizard, and I was impressed, in the extreme, by my new colleagues’ approach to Excel development. Even during the interview process I had realized that, when it came to vba, I was but a babe in the woods. They had auto-updating code (when you “published…

>Inevitably, new hires would be unhappy that they did, in fact, have to write vba code all day and would argue for switching to a better language

JavaScript alone should prove that the "better" language does not win on language design alone (These days it is at least pretty ok)

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#139

Post by raxxorrax »

kevas wrote: post #63

Nah... why should it? It works and it does what it needs to do and more if you decide to hook into the Windows API or Mac’s API. Want to parse 500mb structured XML file? Okay. Takes 3 seconds or so. I had a lot of fun creating a full featured & modern look & feel application using Excel’s VBA runtime as my platform. Sure... I had to create everything from scratch, but learned so much while doing it. Kind of miss it a…

We still have Access/Filemaker in use. Just as a frontend, but still. There could be something better, but often there just isn't. Some turned their Access apps up to eleven, with maps integration for navigation, address completion, automatic correspondance functions, automatic dashboarding for different departments... some are even more advanced than the latest stock CRM/ERP solutions from known developers.

There certainly would be a better solutions, but reimplementing some of those apps would take months or even years of development time. Completely crazy.

Re: Will VBA Die? (2019)

#140

Post by thanatropism »

warpech wrote: post #33
bitxbit wrote: post #18

Imagine Excel with Python. Edit: I believe Libre has python.

https://www.xlwings.org/

I made some code using xlwings to allow you to emulate spreadsheets with machine learning models à la scikit-learn.

https://github.com/asemic-horizon/stanton

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