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Microsoft Considers Adding Python As an Official Scripting Language in Excel (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is considering adding Python as one of the official Excel scripting languages, according to a topic on Excel's feedback hub opened last month. Since it was opened, the topic has become the most voted feature request, double the votes of the second-ranked proposition. "Let us do scripting with Python! Yay! Not only as an alternative to VBA, but also as an alternative to field functions (=SUM(A1:A2))," the feature request reads, as opened by one of Microsoft's users.
The OS maker responded yesterday by putting up a survey to gather more information and how users would like to use Python inside Excel. If approved, Excel users would be able to use Python scripts to interact with Excel documents, their data, and some of Excel's core functions, similar to how Excel currently supports VBA scripts. Python is one of the most versatile programming languages available today. It is also insanely popular with developers. It ranks second on the PYPL programming languages ranking, third in the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, and fourth in the TIOBE index.
The OS maker responded yesterday by putting up a survey to gather more information and how users would like to use Python inside Excel. If approved, Excel users would be able to use Python scripts to interact with Excel documents, their data, and some of Excel's core functions, similar to how Excel currently supports VBA scripts. Python is one of the most versatile programming languages available today. It is also insanely popular with developers. It ranks second on the PYPL programming languages ranking, third in the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings, and fourth in the TIOBE index.
nah, semicolons are there no matter what.
Changing editors can *totally* mess up the whitespace.
Yes, literal spaces will help, but all it takes is one idiot/mistake and the codebase is pooched.
That and the fact that 2.x code can't run virtually unmodified on 3.x interpreters really pisses me off. Perl, for all its warts, just needs
use perl4;
at the top of the file right after the crunchbang and you're good to go with an old as dirt script on the newest interpreters.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Python is a .NET language. Microsoft's IronPython compiles to .NET and uses the .NET framework instead of Python's regular packages. And VB.NET is not really "a new version of VB6" at all - it's a whole different language that's more like C# with its syntax altered to visually resemble BASIC. It doesn't behave like VB at all.
To all those predicting doom and gloom: Excel doesn't fit the role of an IDE, it fits the role of the debugger. Sometimes, much better than a debugger integrated in the IDE.
For those who know what we are doing, a spreadsheet is a wonderful tool for rapid prototyping business processes and gathering input from domain experts at the initial phase, when requirements are not at all clear and change quickly.
Having a modern language friendly to exploration and prototyping would be a welcome addition.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Lua is more user friendly. It has less features, dynamic typing, starts at 1, doesn't care about whitespace, and was designed to be embedded within other things*. All those things are good qualities for people newish to programming.
*Which'll improve its security compared to Python. You can easily remove function/modules from the language and you can isolate parts of a script from each other. It's trivial to load a new module and prevent it from accessing the I/O system.
Sometimes I mock things up in Excel before handing it to a developer to code... being able to use Python in the mockup would be pretty awesome and give me more experience in a coding language that is actually widely applicable... seems like a win-win.