One of things that at least the old Microsoft was really good at was backward comparability.
Did they break that recently ?
They keep compatibility but abandon a lot of stuff. If they switch to JavaScript VBA development will slow to almost nothing and it will take years for the JavaScript stuff to catch up, if ever.
Something similar happened with visual studio. 2008 was really nice, very customizable and fast. Then they redid everything in 2010 and the result was slower with way less capability. And even now there are still a lot of features that 2008 had not implemented.
Agreed. JavaScript has no real upside here besides being fashionable. whereas built-in C# with access to the .Net framework would be really powerful.
JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…
Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.
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 .xlam file and just give it to the users instead of A separate visual studio project that creates an installer on each build.
Excel interop would have been easier too(probably, I'm not 100% sure.) But using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel libs are kinda hard. I don't have any good reference material for this lib, but for VBA, there are tutorials all over the internet for doing common things.
I mostly avoided VBA because I prefer the syntax of C#. I would imagine most people that only know VBA would have no interest in using C# to write office interop code, and I don't blame them. As for javascript, I doubt anyone that knows VBA well would have a hard time learning javascript, and if the codebehind for excel was slowly migrated to that, most devs would welcome the change.
JavaScript has a huge upside because a lot of people already know JavaScript. The more tools and platforms switch to JavaScript the more of an office superhero users are when they know something about the language. The productivity of employees will jump off the charts. When you send someone to train for one thing that utilizes JavaScript you get the benefit that those skills may also happen to work with something el…
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.
You're right, we should automate everything with Rust \s
People both over and underestimate the ability of users to learn a language for quick scripting/automation. Languages like Bash, Python, JS, VBA... they're extremely accessible for quick and dirty work, which is why people latch on to them compared to others.
Ha - good timing! I've been using VBA today and yesterday actually!
Often only a few times a year I use it now but when I do it I feel productive.
In case your wondering I has a previous Excel VBA Macro that I wrote for updating a SQL Server Database based on data in Excel. The macro first has to run checks against data in an IBM AS/400 Database.
I ended up having to pull out the macro to do a bulk update in an ERP. It was faster to do this then re-write in an modern language (especially since I work with the data in Excel first).