91–100 of 108 posts
VBA wasn’t bad enough, now millions of analysts will have to contend with spreadsheet spaghetti and JavaScript.
however, VBA code is also spaghetti code with global vars and mixed into it.
Source: I have debugged vba macros in excel before.
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I'm thinking of all the places where I've seen Excel used in operations. Often it's the only software the company uses. Now we're going to get people who've done a little javascript in college using it to elaborate the Spreadsheet That Runs Our Business. In all likelihood, the resulting chimera will make an impenetrable tangle of VBA and Javascript.
So, when are you developers going to build an End-User Development platform with decent engineering practices, to replace Excel for business users?
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I get the appeal of "DAE hate JS" on Reddit where everyone upvotes you, but it seems out of place on a forum of professionals because JS is not much different than other dynamically-typed languages. I'd say it's better than Python which doesn't have async-by-default nor idiomatic closures. But "puke" is a bit childish.
I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice. Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit. The…
The language where when you 3/2 you get integer. Try R, the language created/developed by Statisricians for Statisticians. Python doesn't even have a buil-in support for missing data.
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One issue with embedding Python is that it's difficult to sandbox - to securely limit what the embedded runtime, and hence (potentially malicious) custom functions, can do: > [The Python developers'] standard answer to "How do I sandbox Python code?" has been "Use a subprocess and the OS provided process sandboxing facilities" for quite some time. [1] JavaScript, OTOH, is designed to support secure in-process sandbox…
Good point. Another architectural difference between the languages is that Javascript is a [relatively] small language with a long history of working with external API's [i.e. the browser]. On the other hand, Python has extensive standard libraries that would require alignment with Excel. For example, how does csv.reader integrate? It looks like a can of "do the obvious thing" worms and a mountain of unexpected resul…
Interesting - I hadn't really noticed how pronounced this dichotomy within dynamic languages is. On the one hand there are small languages designed for embedding and sandboxing (e.g. JavaScript, Lua, Tcl) and on the other hand, larger, more general-purpose languages (Perl, Python, Ruby).
I always assumed that a dynamic language could work well in both contexts, but in fact, most lie fundamentally on one side of the divide or the other. Only JavaScript, due to its immense popularity, has really managed (with Node.js) to expand from the first category into the second.
If Python were to be embedded in Excel, it would be expanding from the second category into the first. As you mention, to do this safely it may be necessary to create a special (subset) version of the language. Matz, the creator of Ruby, is trying to take his language in this direction with mruby [1] - a "lightweight implementation of Ruby complying to (part of) the ISO standard".
But, will these subset versions ever be popular? They necessarily leave the majority of the language's ecosystem behind - and knowledge of the full language will not necessarily transfer directly to the subset. Can a subset of an existing general-purpose language, even a widely-known one, compete against other languages that are specifically designed for safe embedding?
More generally, is it possible for a dynamic language to work well on both sides of the divide, or must all (even brand-new) languages choose one side or the other?
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I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice. Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit. The…
> python absolutely brutally dominates the data science space The language where when you 3/2 you get integer. Try R, the language created/developed by Statisricians for Statisticians. Python doesn't even have a buil-in support for missing data.
I don't know what you mean by built in support for missing data but at language level there is None and in numpy/pandas there is np.NaN
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I'd kind of assume everyone on HN has made their minds up about languages and I'm not qualified to change the opinions of any of them or even really try to be informative. So the puke is just for the (70% at a guess?) people who would agree that this is a bad choice. Since I work with both python and javascript in exactly this dirty moving data around for analysts space (but haven't for long), I'll qualify a bit. The…
JavaScript has every feature you listed, plus a ton. I'll give you the batteries included part, but you're missing the critical component here, which is Python's dep mgmt story is terrible. Pyenv seems cool, but it's basically NPM - which is a critical part of what they're trying to do here.
It doesn't have anything like python's built in power of classes, it's not just having a class syntax which is a thin wrapper around prototypes, it's having metaclasses, class decorators, properties, type comparison that works for inheritance, super().
It also doesn't have sane types/casts.
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I'm the kind of person this is directly aimed at, finance background, Excel officionado begging for a better scripting language. I can tell you that I am not interested in js for Excel one bit. Python for Excel however...
I can't agree enough. Python baked in would be a dream come true.
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I'd suggest ExcelDNA rather than VSTO. But that doesn't help with your main point (nothing to install or support, you can extend the spreadsheet without having to compile or install anything) which I completely agree with.
Agreed, thanks I do use ExcelDNA, it is much better than VSTO. But really I've given up on Excel now.
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Good point. Another architectural difference between the languages is that Javascript is a [relatively] small language with a long history of working with external API's [i.e. the browser]. On the other hand, Python has extensive standard libraries that would require alignment with Excel. For example, how does csv.reader integrate? It looks like a can of "do the obvious thing" worms and a mountain of unexpected resul…
> Python being designed as a systems language rather than a scripting language Interesting - I hadn't really noticed how pronounced this dichotomy within dynamic languages is. On the one hand there are small languages designed for embedding and sandboxing (e.g. JavaScript, Lua, Tcl) and on the other hand, larger, more general-purpose languages (Perl, Python, Ruby). I always assumed that a dynamic language could work…
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JavaScript has every feature you listed, plus a ton. I'll give you the batteries included part, but you're missing the critical component here, which is Python's dep mgmt story is terrible. Pyenv seems cool, but it's basically NPM - which is a critical part of what they're trying to do here.
You can definitely mess up with python envs but JS absolutely doesn't have all the features I listed. It doesn't have anything like python's built in power of classes, it's not just having a class syntax which is a thin wrapper around prototypes, it's having metaclasses, class decorators, properties, type comparison that works for inheritance, super(). It also doesn't have sane types/casts.