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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

#401
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it about time? The "32" ought to be a clue...

So? When were the POSIX APIs designed? Probably before 16 bit was common. By that logic we should migrate off that as well.

In all fairness there are a fair number of POSIX APIs that are dangerous and need to be deprecated and removed.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every dynamically-typed language has "weird" behaviour around type coercion, that's simply the nature of the beast. No, that's not true at all. Dynamic languages don't necessarily have type coercion at all, much less weird behavior around it (and, conversely, statically typed languages they have coercion may have weird behavior around it; there's just no link between dynamic typing and weird coercion behavior.)

Who's to say not doing type coercion isn't weird? Every dynamic language treats things slightly differently.

> Who's to say not doing type coercion isn't weird?

Well, if someone has to do it, I will: not doing type coercion isn't weird, and doing inplicit type coercion (not strict promotion[0]) is both weird and dangerous.

But, in any cases that's not really the point. The point is that in this...

> Every dynamic language treats things slightly differently.

“dynamic” is irrelevant. Languages have a wide variety of approaches, doing promotion, coercion, neither, or both (though where both are done, it's often just called coercion even when it is promotion), and dynamic vs. static is mostly irrelevant.

[0] that is, where the “from" type has a range that is a subset of the range of the “to” type.so that there is never a change in meaning resulting from the conversion.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#403

I know the architecture too good, more than I need as I was leaving MS recently. This tweet is not likely to happen. Talking about desktop apps, this doesn't make any sense. Office apps have millions of lines in code and many years of lost knowledge between the classes. Just too many screens, checkboxes and features. A complete bloatware. Buy MS doesn't take any feature off the app- if you have 1B users, most likely…

Is it possible there will simply be "Office 365" standalone apps that are basically just baked-down versions of the web apps (like typical Electron style apps), but distinct from the official desktop apps? I could see there being some utility to this such as speed vs running in the browser, large-scale enterprise deployment, convenience reasons (why I always run the standalone Slack app myself), etc..

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#404
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you figure out how to build a cross-platform application distribution mechanism that is better than the modern web, please do let us know!

I sure will. The challenge here is social. The Web has fist-mover advantage. Also, I fear that doing it the right way would be equivalent to forcing standardization on a single operating system (or a family of systems).

The Web has fist-mover advantage.

Typo reveals essential truth.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe they will ever duplicate all the edge cases. I mean in some cases it's literally impossible because IIRC VBA can actually hook into Win32 functions (I mean I guess you might argue that feature is a bad idea)

If VBA can hook into WIN32 functions, why do you think a VBA parser/interpreter written in JavaScript using a native module that exposes the same WIN32 functions couldn’t do the same

I suppose that's true; I just imagined it was going to be sandboxed to be browser-compatible.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#407
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.

Killing VBA would be a business error, deprecating it with proper transition (language analysis, translation) would be a business hygiene.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#408
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example spreadsheet that shows the slowness in LibreOffice?

Try plotting a 2x10000 range in libreoffice. Takes > 2 Mon just to render the graph. I'd be happy to provide the CSV to anyone interested

I know this is impertinent, but can you lodge a bug with the project?

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#409
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I think “pile of trash” might be a bit too far, but JavaScript is a weird choice for one major reason: most languages have several objective technical and strategiec advantages. JavaScript has exactly two: it is the only language available in a browser, and it is on a large number of people’s resumes. There is no technical dimension of JavaScript that makes it the best choice for any task outside the browser, and…

>There is no technical dimension of JavaScript that makes it the best choice for any task outside the browser Seriously? How about async-everything?

JS is not the only language with async capabilities.

Any number of other mature languages have async (and parallel, unlike JS) tools available.

Re: Office 365 is being completely rewritten in JavaScript

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not Typescript, btw?

I'd almost guarantee that it's Typescript. But being a superset of Javascript, it's still correct to call it Javascript.

It's really not. YAML is a superset of JSON, but you wouldn't call a YAML document a JSON document. The set of all colors is a superset of the set containing only orange, but calling every color orange makes no sense.
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