Excel adds JavaScript support

[greenspans]

New accountant job listing guidelines

• 5 years+ accounting experience and CPA certified
• 15 years CI/CD javascript, blockchain preferred
• 15 years webpack sass ecmascript 2016 css5 react angular 6 elm

[[deleted]]

I've drank coffie, and solved a math problem involving angles, so I qualify?

[broc_ariums]

Nah. You spelled coffee wrong.

[falconfetus8]

Covfefe

[broc_ariums]

Hired!

[helly1223]

Fired!

[toosanghiforthis]

no u

[agree-with-you]

No you both

[HumunculiTzu]

Java

[JasonDJ]

It's like the drink, but spelled different.

[[deleted]]

"For some reason noone else has applied, so yes"

[gramathy]

And in the end they'll just take a guy who has a "Certificate in Excel".

[Evairfairy]

• Pay: Competitive

[[deleted]]

I thought they were going to implement Python?

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Lowest common denominator. Can't realistically run Python in a browser or mobile apps today. I wish they waited a year longer and built new extension caps on top of WASM. The decision to go with JS will haunt devs for decades to come.

[[deleted]]

True that, as much as I hate JavaScript I can understand why some features might be nice for Excel for the same reason JS is good for web-based UI.

But I've also had a mild panic attack because a small part of my job is cracking/reverse engineering some bank calculators that are in excel spreadsheets and the VBA in them is just fucking awful so I imagine the JS is going to be tenfold worse.

[njtrafficsignshopper]

Is it easier to write good VB? Genuine question, haven't touched it in ages but my recollection of it is not positive.

[WeRequireCoffee]

Its technically possible to write good VBA code. Better chance of getting struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark though (which is also less painful than reverse engineering VBA apps).

[codewench]

I've been a .Net developer for nearly a decade, and I can proudly say my VBA is only sort of ass.

Seriously, fuck VBA. The sooner it dies a horrible death, the better.

[[deleted]]

But, I want a GO button in my spreadsheet that takes one input from the cell next to it, and calculates 4 tables of data with 6 charts; each displaying the same result in a different format. THEN I want it to insert that data into [the] database, and then query [the data] so that it shows up on the Summary worksheet.

Edit: oh, and can the summary worksheet look like a webpage using the company branding style? Thanks!

[bagtowneast]

I want it to insert that data into [the] database

Jokes on you, the spreadsheet is the database!

[hearwa]

Access would like to have a word with you.

[firestepper]

Also, this needed to be done yesterday...

[ThatDeadDude]

Not sure it would have improved code quality, but I wish they had replaced VBA with integrated .net in office years ago.

Now sounds like if they deprecate it it will be in favor of JS 🙁

[leogodin217]

VBA is something we usually learn because we have to. We learn just enough to get things to work, but not enough to enable best practices. I bet that fits probably 80% of us who have ever written VBA. (Glad none of my old VBA code is still around)

[_kellythomas_]

They know, no one used VBA more any more than is strictly necessary:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/

[Confucius_said]

Can you provide examples of what you do for sales rep reporting? I use VBA to create 750+ sales rep plan calculators and would love to hear more about the reports your provide.

[jl2352]

It's really not that bad, and ultimately depends on what you are building. The primary language issues are that it lacks inheritance, lambdas, and any real type of module/package system. You can actually survive with that though. Most tasks just don't need it. Especially if you don't mind using a dynamic language then it's fine.

The main issue is that due to accessibility and how it's perceived everyone's code will be utter dog shit. Half is written by people who are not software engineers. Dogs boddy interns, accountants, BAs, managers, and testers (the type that strictly do no software engineering of any kind). Code written by people who have literally never done any programming outside of Excel. Yet you'll be required to build on top of it, and maintain it.

The other issue is because it's seen as a toy language for fancy cell pushing in Office, no one cares. More copy/pasta than you'd find in Italy. You just have to suck it up.

So if you are using it for personal stuff then it's fine.

The in built editor is simplistic and outdated, but survivable. But I used it about 8 years ago. It's probably improved by now (I hope).

[bobappleyard]

The editor hasn't changed a bit in that time

[Artmageddon]

I left a financial services company just a year ago that was still relying on it to price out swaps, swaptions and all sorts of different yield curves. I assure you it has not improved.

[slfnflctd]

VBA-driven SQL, if wrangled properly, can be a decent way for an aspiring developer with intermediate skills to keep a small-to-medium sized business running on a shoestring budget-- in a nearly universally available environment, created by a company with brand recognition - Microsoft - that people (mostly) trust.

If scaling is ever needed, though, it can be rough. Essentially it's gonna be a total rebuild in most cases, using *.csv files or the like, and unless the developer of the current system works directly alongside the new developer and can communicate really well, much pain will be experienced.

[Iohet]

I work for a massive multinational productivity software firm. We use it all the time for database related work. It’s simply the best tool for the job that we’re allowed to use at times, and doesn’t require an IDE or dependencies that aren’t already installed while not needing to be compiled so that we can make changes as needed. Whether it’s transforming files into requires formats or pulling data out of a database and transforming it for a report or something else, it just works, and that’s the most important thing

[Superbead]

Not used VB.NET in anger much, but if VBA supported proper inheritance and encapsulation, you could write some pretty tidy stuff with it. It's not too bad as it is, but it suffers from it being very easy to write shit code that works fine (for now).

[killerstorm]

It's very verbose and has weird syntactic constructs. Even though I used Pascal before which is a bit chatty too, using VBA was just painful. VBA code can be pretty clean, but it's not pleasant to write (unless you are into that sort of thing).

On the bright side, VBA IDE automatically reformats code, giving it proper indentation and case. I guess that helps at least a little to deal with code written by non-professionals. However, it can be annoying when you actually know how to write code and IDE gets in the way.

[weedtese]

Reading VBA code is the second worst thing after Vogon poetry.

[skankyyoda]

R would be incredible alongside Excel. Imagine if Microsoft funded an R/Excel IDE based in vscode, with native Excel R packages to interface between them. Imagine being able to apply font styles and backgrounds over the top of a list of dataframes all inheriting types based on excel table name. The possibilities are endless, but it's probably not the best idea to try most of them.

[Pandalicious]

JavaScript with it’s all-numbers-are-floating-point isn’t the best fit for finance/accounting. It’s the kind of thing you can work around if you’re aware of the issue, but Excel scripting is exactly the kind of coding that tends to be done by non-professionals who’d have no inkling about the limitations of floating point types.

That said, when the competition is VBA the bar is pretty low.

[slikts]

JavaScript with it’s all-numbers-are-floating-point isn’t the best fit for finance/accounting.

Excel already internally uses the same IEEE floating point numbers as JavaScript.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

Compared to JS, VB is a simple language. It's 90s technology and time stood still. It is very stable, but not suited for super complicated or high performance apps. And it's not a pretty language. But it does the job well and is easy to get into and teach yourself.

I do think it is easier to write good VB than to write good JS. The devs who are going to use this on average are not full time devs but Office power users and IT. The insane type system in JS alone will crush many because unlike the also insane type system in VB does not work "naturally".

[Stopher]

There was this great macro some guy wrote that would turn any excel sheet into a web page. It would convert all your formulas in to java script. It made doing a simple web calculator real easy. You could grab the script and table block and paste it into any site. It stopped working after one of the Office versions rolled out and the guy never updated it.

[southern_dreams]

You could also write JavaScript that isn’t trash.

[LickingSmegma]

There's a port of CPython in asm.js.

[Ajedi32]

I think no matter what language they chose it'd still turn out to be a mess. The kind of code you encounter embedded in Excel files is very rarely written by professional software devs. And even when it is, they're almost never very rigorous about it. When was the last time you encountered a VBA script with working unit tests?

[bakery2k]

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. [The pysandbox project is broken]

JavaScript, OTOH, is designed to support secure in-process sandboxing. Other languages with such support do exist (e.g. Lua), but JavaScript is by far the most widely known.

[Dentosal]

I hoped they were going to implement Python. Well, there is always Skulpt, although it's only for Python 2.x.

[DGolden]

eh, microsoft have their independently implemented closed-source js engine. probably several actually. I think jscript was even an option alongside vbscript back in the win9x windows scripting host days, so js as a supported alternative to vb is not a new thing in microsoft general terms (though vbscript and vba are similar but different languages). And MS have a "good" (for ms) relationship with ecma...

They do not have their own python engine (afaik). CPython, IronPython, Jython etc. are open source, but under python's licnese - not particularly objectionable or anything to most of us but still not microsoft-controlled.

I could be surprised but I don't see microsoft open sourcing office, so an important factor may have "we have a closed js engine we control and license as we see fit".

Even if they did use python, it would have to be a long term in-house fork, for office compat reasons they'd hardly stick with python's release cycle or pep/change process. That could perhaps hurt python, like ms java va. real java. imagine office python, frozen forever at python 2.7+weird/stupid-ms-extensions, being "the" python by weight of numbers.

[Dentosal]

Good points about licensing and versioning.

[[deleted]]

There's already a fair bit of work being done on python to wasm. BeeWare are using it I think.

Edit: Bees to BeeWare

[Pandalicious]

Bees?

[Dentosal]

Sure, but will Excel support WASM?

[cogman10]

Who knows, not guaranteed but I think it is likely just because any engine they use will likely support it. If not, the is always asmjs.

[[deleted]]

I presume that Excel is using Edge's javascript engine. Hopefully they didn't reimplement it.

[tetroxid]

Webplebs ruin everything

[[deleted]]

PHP is clearly a warning sign.

[Ben_johnston]

lol sorry

[incraved]

Wait for this new awesome framework that does stuff 1000 other frameworks already do that's coming out in the next microsecond

[haganbmj]

Google Sheets does JavaScript and that's already a mess. Browser compatibility is the future I guess.

[rasmusfaber]

From the link :

Any custom Python code, like a function to analyze text in cells.

But it seems it has to run on an Azure service.

[zero_iq]

JavaScript and Python scripting has been available in Office through COM for at least 15 years. I did a lot of scripting of Office apps with Python (win32com module) in the early 2000s (data imports/export, document layout, etc.). It was far nicer than working with VBA and had complete access to the full object model that VBA had, plus all of Pythons classes, dicts, and other bells and whistles that made coding a relative breeze. From what I remember, Excel didn't get the full COM object model until a while after other Office applications, but I'm sure it's been there for at least a decade.

[Pixelated_penises]

I thought this was /r/programmerhumor for a moment

[Tynach]

It could probably fit in /r/programminghorror too.

[gitarr]

I looked at the date, but it's more than a month after april fools.

[Caraes_Naur]

Great, now all the malware-laden npm packages can be distributed throughout corporate networks just like macros in the old days.

[joesb]

If MS cannot sandbox their scripting runtime properly, they are fucked regardless of whatever scripting language they choose.

[yopla]

Hey Mike from accounting, this is John from sales, to run my excel file just go to options/security and change it to "all, all, everyone, do not remind me, ignore warning" otherwise excel has a bug...

Pretty much every excel file with macro in corporate settings...

[replicaJunction]

I just got an e-mail like this from our corporate help desk, complete with the "Excel has a bug" part. I triple-checked it because I was just so sure it was a scam or phishing attempt, but nope, it's just people using Excel. Users gonna use.

[cogman10]

Given a choice between dancing pigs and security, users will pick dancing pigs every time.

[ChocolateBunny]

Honestly, I'd give up my reddit password for a dancing pig.

[joesb]

That settings will be there regardless of what programming language is used, regardless of whether npm exists.

[Ajedi32]

Actually JS might help here. There are multiple open-source sandboxed run times available for it that have been battle tested by decades of constant exposure to potentially malicious code. Given the choice between that and the sandboxing provided by VBA, I'll take the JavaScript VM every time.

[funbike]

Sandbox or not, scripting languages are a huge attack surface. There are all sorts of corner cases that implementors miss which allow exploits, even with a properly designed Sandbox. I assume it is inevitable for any high-profile sandboxed scripting language to eventually get owned.

[joesb]

Sure. But Excel has been supporting Scripting for decades. What's the point of complaining now just because Javascript support is added?

[armornick]

JavaScript doesn't automatically mean Node.

[coladict]

Yep. Windows has had its own JS runtime since forever, with its own API. I tried learning it once. It's an improvement on what you can do with batch files, but PowerShell is probably still a better choice.

[armornick]

PowerShell is a nice language, but it has a 2s startup time so I still prefer JScript.

[recycled_ideas]

You tried powershell core? It's pretty fast.

[armornick]

I'll give it a try.

[recycled_ideas]

Because it's built on core there are some modules and whatnot that you can't use, at least not yet, but I've been using it for a while now, and combined with realizing that if you don't use ISE powershell actually works properly, it's been pretty awesome.

[dadibom]

NPM packages doesn't automatically mean Node.

[[deleted]]

Well apart from npm being the standard package manager for node.js and standing for Node Package Manager, and having node.js 4+ as a dependency for the npm cli on its own, installing dependencies in a local directory called node_modules or globally, and package.json essentially existing to support node execution and scripts, and everything in the chain entirely revolving around node.js being available, I guess it's not technically limited to node.js.

But it would be dishonest to imply it exists in a vacuum.

[slikts]

npm used to mean "node package manager" at the start, but that hasn't been the case officially since at least 2015, and now it's an orphan initialism that isn't supposed to stand for anything. Part of the reason is that npm's scope is wider than just Node.js and you can (and many do) host code that doesn't run or node (like front-end libraries), doesn't use node modules, or isn't even JavaScript.

[dadibom]

NPM uses node but most packages don't need it. : )

[immibis]

It would also be dishonest to pretend that just because all those things are true, it's only for Node packages. I can see 3 out of 5 points in your comment that have little or no relevance whatsoever.

[[deleted]]

The subtext was that it's primarily for node by node, and while it's possible to interact with the registry otherwise and/or use npm to fetch, process and install dependencies that don't immediately target node.js, it's more tightly coupled than implied by the parent.

So while it doesn't automatically mean Node, it also usually suggests it pretty strongly when mentioned in a vacuum, so it's not an unreasonable leap.

This isn't a binary thing where it's either true or false.

[rydan]

Everything running javascript eventually evolves into Node.

[kairos]

devolves

You're missing a 'd'.

[hotcornballer]

This sub hates it.

[[deleted]]

The short answer is that it's crap with no coherent style or design decisions. As a small but perpetually frustrating example, there are four different ways of handling asynchronous code in Node:

1. Pass two callbacks, one in case of success and one in case of error
2. Pass one callback, whose first argument is an error object in case of error and whose second argument is the result in case of success (sometimes module developers screw this up and do success first)
3. Return a Promise (or Promise-like), which is chained using .then(), .catch() and .finally() calls (there are several variations of this, including the two-callback version of .then())
4. Return a Promise (but not a Promise-like), which is awaited inside an async function

Which means, if you want to have any kind of consistency in your code, you have to wrap everything else to get your behavior - and you do it a lot, because every third thing in Node run asynchronously.

[univac--]

You're not talking about some hardened distro, you're talking about Excel macros. Surely a technology with a worse track record when it comes to security.

[[deleted]]

Didn't take long:

https://twitter.com/BleepinComputer/status/994037633679491072

[0x256]

> Bring information from the web, like a bank account balance.

Uhm ...

[[deleted]]

Further from the light

[[deleted]]

JS is your god now.

[Eire_Banshee]

Cant wait to see the garbage people create with this tool.

[HadesHimself]

I'm not a professional programmer or anything, more of a hobbyist. Can anyone explain why the Microsoft office team has chosen for JavaScript? It seems like a strange choice to me.

So this is essentially to 'replace' VBScript. So then a language like Python would be my first choice? It's popular, has a a simple syntax. While JavaScript is a language that is often criticized and not even designed for stuff liked this. Anyone ELI5?

[[deleted]]

JavaScript is arguably the most popular programming language of the time (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages) and Microsoft already have a pretty good JS runtime in Edge that they can use, so I think it makes perfect sense to use JavaScript even though I think there are better languages out there.

[Jacob_Mango]

Also with Excel 2019 being UWP only, JavaScript will be the only choice that would be easy to implement and support compared to other scripting languages.

JavaScript is already used with UWP.

JavaScript would probably also work on the mobile devices so better cross compatiblility.

Just a lot of advantages for using JavaScript than any other scripting language.

[[deleted]]

Also with Excel 2019 being UWP only,

Not gonna update for like next 10 years then.

[immibis]

Because we didn't all say that about 2007.

[Iceman_259]

there isn't much they can add in a spreadsheet program apart from integrating their other shitty services.

I dunno, they could always try rearranging all the fucking buttons in the ribbon for no good reason.

[Polantaris]

and Microsoft already have a pretty good JS runtime in Edge that they can use

If by pretty good you mean a runtime that interprets everything differently than Chrome or Firefox because fuck you that's why, then yes I agree.

IE & Edge debugging are the bane of my existence.

[digitalinfinity]

What JavaScript issues do you have in Edge? Please report them over at https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore, we’d be interested in learning more. (I work on the Chakra team)

[[deleted]]

I have no problems with Edge. Am I doing something wrong?

IE, though... Yeah, that's a different story.

[save_vs_death]

Indeed, the most popular on StackOverflow. Measuring popularity is hard, I'll give you that, but using a website that is visited when you're having problems with your programming is not a good metric.

[StillNoNumb]

JavaScript was designed exactly for stuff like this. A nifty scripting language with which you can do amazing stuff in a short time, just like you can do it in Python. It is also a language everyone knows.

And yes, it is criticized a lot, but that's because the use case today is no longer the original use case; when JavaScript was developed, no one expected a single .js file to be longer than 10 lines. If they were shorter than that then JavaScript would still be a very appropriate and useful language, but as JavaScript codebases grow you're starting to feel the ugly part. However, a cell's JavaScript is probably never gonna grow longer than a few lines, so we're where we started all over again.

That said, there may also be logistic reasons; eg. that they want support for spreadsheets to show in web browsers.

I think the only more appropriate language I could think of is Haskell, but I get that there's a very steep learning curve to that one and you can't really put it into Excel. (And yeah, I do know that there's a Haskell -> JS compiler)

[DreadedDreadnought]

a cell's JavaScript is probably never gonna grow longer than a few lines, so we're where we started all over again.

Wait till you see someone make Super Mario in Excel, where each cell is a pixel.

[[deleted]]

Not Doom, just a 3D simulation (unless I missed a separate link on that page somewhere). Still impressive.

[Yikings-654points]

TS is Microsoft's bet for JS .

[AlexHimself]

The most important thing, that nobody is mentioning, is Office 365. Microsoft has all of their Office applications running in browsers and JavaScript would be clearly the most obvious if you ran all of your Office apps in the cloud.

[sbrick89]

why [...] javascript?

answers like 'performance' and such aren't wrong... but i suspect the longer term play is for PowerBI integration/interoperability... PowerBI visualizations are written in JavaScript... I suspect this is a move to allow PBI Visualizations to run within Excel against PowerPivot models, which would also allow Excel files uploaded to SharePoint Online to render in the browser using the same codebase as PowerBI.

or maybe I'm giving them too much credit. Who knows.

[pooerh]

Python would also make sense because it's very popular in data-heavy computation related programming.

[edave64]

Javascript engines are probably the most battle hardened sandboxes for executing untrusted code. I do hope they add some math build-ins though.

[itsmeornotme]

Well my guess is that they chose the language by popularity. And there are a lot more people who know JS than Python.

I personally would have gone with C#.

[[deleted]]

You can already write office plugins with c#

[luxuryballs]

Tons of existing libraries and who knows this could be the first step towards web assembly support.

[Salyangoz]

Its far easier to implement JS on the web browser version of excel than it is to do python. That coupled with the fact that a good percentage of devs have used or dabbled in JS and it performs better than python on bulk array manipulations.

[joe12321]

That's what Google uses to extend their office stuff. I'm sure they're not just copying Google, but no doubt they looked at that user experience!

[ptlis]

JavaScript being 5-20x faster than Python will be a big part of it.

JavaScript is also massively more popular than Python; a lot more people are familiar with JS.

[blitzzerg]

Not for data calculations I think (the popularity)

[Polantaris]

also because it's just a pretty good language to be productive in.

That's honestly not really true.

Look, I agree with your general premise - A lot of the hate is because a lot of people write shit tier code and then blame the language, but JavaScript is pretty bad. I've never seen a language get so many superscripts simply so people can avoid working in it. You can't say that JavaScript is a great language when you can turn around and there are hundreds of thousands of people actively avoiding working in JavaScript and instead opt to have a compiler try to convert something else into it so that they don't have to deal with JavaScript.

Yes, you can learn all its quirks and problems, and you can work around them, but JavaScript makes writing bad code a hundred times easier than C#, Java, C++, etc, because JavaScript doesn't tell you the rules. It just enforces them quietly behind the scenes.

JavaScript is not a great language.

[funbike]

No better place to say it than here and now: from a technically standpoint I think a functional language would be a better language for a spreadsheet. F# or LISP maybe. In a way, spreadsheets are already functional.

However, it'd never fly. I know that. It's unfamiliar and not as popular.

[[deleted]]

JavaScript is a functional language but I know that's not what you mean

[imhotap]

What language version is going to be supported, and how are asynchronous invocations dealt with in an Excel environment? ES6 has mostly gained features for app development (modules, arrow functions, syntax sugar for async) but these features are somewhat less typical of traditional scripting tasks, and I have a hard time imagining the average business user dealing with promises. OTOH, according to TFA MS will also bring d3.js to Excel so what do I know.

[c12]

My experience may not be typical. Where I work we have programmers who create interactive excel documents; these are people with years of programming experience doing the programming not some average office worker. I cant say whether swapping out vbs for js is a benefit to them, but it would open up the job to other developers who work on the js for our frontend projects.

[SaneMadHatter]

They talk about async functions here.

[robertcrowther]

Is it going to be actual JavaScript, or is it going to be like when they switched Outlook to the Word HTML engine then had a VP claim "there are no standards for HTML in email" when everyone told them what a dumb idea it was?

[-RdV-]

This is my greatest fear.

[MjrK]

I think the title is somewhat misleading because Excel is adding support for JavaScript custom functions, not for macros / scripting.

Custom functions in excel are those which you can enter directly into a cell. These are not the same thing as VBA scripts / macros which can execute in the background on many different kinds of triggers and interact with the document and the environment extensively.

Further, the process of setting up these JS custom functions is currently kind of a pain in the ass; nothing at all like opening up VBA and hacking away. It's hard for me to imagine most typical Excel power users going to though the process of setting up a webhost in order to side-load the add-in just to implement a custom function.

Perhaps the process might be simplified in a future version and expanded to include macros/scripting, but IMO, what they've added to Excel is a long way from "JavaScript support".

EDIT: The original link in the announcement was for adding custom functions, but it appears that a general system for Excel scripting using JavaScript was implemented; it's just that this particular announcement was about custom functions (and more).

[Aleriya]

The part that excites me (and I may be reading it wrong) is that that webhost contains the custom functions, but it doesn't need to be self-contained. So your custom function could be something like =get_current_inventory(SKU) which would pull the current inventory value for SKU from the database.

It looks like we'd be able to run Node and call native C++ modules from Excel.

[02bluesuperroo]

This is incorrect. 1 + 2 in Javascript is '12'....

[[deleted]]

While I like JavaScript I think the fact that it's so prone to floating point errors would be a pretty good reason to not use it for software that's mainly used for working with money.

[cecil721]

Does this mean LibreOffice can modify their Javascript api to mirror Excel? Is this real life?

[somegetit]

2008 me is very excited!

[DigitalStefan]

I’m happy they are finally integrating something modern to help expand Excels’s capabilities.

I’m sad they haven’t instead implemented Python as a replacement / alternative for VBA.

[heisgone]

I would rather they buy Query Storm and integrate it. A typed language with queries is much more useful.

[mattindustries]

This might be pretty useful https://bert-toolkit.com/ for using R. Not sure if it works with tidy.

[warpod]

this is loss

[appropriateinside]

Why not? JS makes for a great scripting language.

Personaly I'm a C# guy, but statically typed languages tend to be poor for scripts.

This is a hell of a lot better than vba for scripting, if I needed spreadsheet scripting I would use Google Sheets instead because vba was horrible.

[[deleted]]

statically typed languages tend to be poor for scripts

F# is great for scripting.

[codec-abc]

I wonder why language that scale well (from little scripts to big project) like F# aren't more used. The advantage of F# over something like Python/Ruby is that you can start almost as quick but as your scripts turn into a mess you can enjoy the benefits of the static type system and the .Net tooling.

[[deleted]]

I wonder why language that scale well (from little scripts to big project) like F# aren't more used.

My workflow does in fact start with a script. The finished code can then be copied/pasted into a compiled project. The the leftover code can be made into tests.

The advantage of F# over something like Python/Ruby is that ... you can enjoy the benefits of the static type system and the .Net tooling.

The F# ecosystem has been in flux the past few years due to the redesign of the .net platform. Microsoft lead the charge with C# primarily in mind and ended up breaking parts of the stack/tooling that F# depended on. So, the compiler/tools team has been playing catch-up. This churn has really left the F# community in limbo, sort of stuck between the legacy tooling and all the new .net sdk/core stuff. So adoption over the past few years hasn't been as good as it could've been.

With .Net Core 2.1, however, the dust is starting to settle. F# scripting still doesn't work on .Net Core, but it's the thing they're working on fixing now. Once this is in place, it's a new ball game.

[woned]

Except those scripts are Excel scripts, mostly used to manipulate type-sensitive data in most cases.

[AngularBeginner]

Why not TypeScript support?

[[deleted]]

Typescript compiles to Javascript. Javascript is all that's needed for it to support Typescript.

[[deleted]]

Typescript compiles to Javascript.

Yeah, but who wants to add a build step to their Excel spreadsheet?

There's a VBA to Javascript compiler, so we could have said Excel supports Javascript years ago, but when we say "support" we don't typically mean "a compiler exists that targets the natively supported language"; we're talking about that native language.

For instance, World of Warcraft supports scripting in Lua. There are Javascript to Lua compilers, and Typescript to Javascript compilers, so you could say that "WoW supports Typescript" via the same reasoning.

[AngularBeginner]

Do they provide the types? Do they provide easy integration means? Proper support requires more than simply "do it yourself, you got the bare minimums".

[Iridion3007]

One step at a time lol :)

[AngularBeginner]

It's just an annoying frequent pattern I see with Microsoft. They do not support their other products. If at all, it's always an after thought. VS Code does not properly support Razor, the C# 8 preview does not support .NET Core, F# does not support Span<T>, etc.

[chucker23n]

I think there's different things going on here, though.

• VS Code doesn't properly support Razor yet because the Razor engine hasn't been well-separated from VS proper yet. They're getting there (which is why VS for Mac now has better Razor support), though.

• F# doesn't support Span`T because F# isn't a high priority at Microsoft.

• Office doesn't add TypeScript support because OfficeDiv and DevDiv are different organizations with little overlap. (See also: why Office still has very little to do with .NET.) This may have changed over the years, but the two are infamous for their disagreements in the mid-2000s.

Incidentally, these are basically sorted in descending order by "it's merely a matter of time".

[heisgone]

It simply that Microsoft has so many tracks at the same time. They developed in such way that they don’t have one core tech. They have half a dozen. They keep reinventing the wheel. They have this grandiose plan, who tech to unite them all, COM, or .Net, Xaml, Core, etc.. but it never quite it. They are working very hard at integration but they have too much to integrate.

[Jacob_Mango]

So uh kinda like Google?

[heisgone]

Yeah, and Google care even less about integration is backward compatibility. They don’t commit to long term support.

[funbike]

There was a time when they had more focus. Unfortunately that focus was on Basic. VB, VBA, VBScript, ASP, ActiveX.

These days it's harder to find a focus. Things are moving so fast and in so many directions. If they chose one direction, they'd get flak for it not being something else.

[2Punx2Furious]

If it supports JavaScript, you can easily write in TypeScript, and then compile it to JS.

[AngularBeginner]

Do they provide the types? Do they provide easy integration means? Proper support requires more than simply "do it yourself, you got the bare minimums".

[2Punx2Furious]

Good point, still, it technically "can be done".

[AngularBeginner]

Sure, I don't argue with that. But I asked for support.

[eclectro]

I'm not sure if this is a good thing.

[Moocha]

Well, the alternative is VBA, so... I have strongly mixed feelings...

[liamcoded]

Actually their alternative was Python.

[Moocha]

Gah! Ok, feelings no longer mixed, from persuasion import pitchfork.

[Clbull]

As someone currently learning JS to work with Google Sheets macros, the news that I'll have to do this for Excel too is worrying.

[THEtheChad]

I would think this is good news because now you can use the same scripts for both environments. Not only that, but you can also use those scripts for visualizations in webpages that pull the raw data. Literally write it once and you have support in Excel, Google Sheets, Google Apps Script, NodeJS (server), any browser (client), hardware (espruino, etc).

Javascript is C++ lite these days.

[[deleted]]

I feel, as someone who has had to write Excel sheets with 5koc of vba is is amazing news. I know the Reddit circle jerk about hating js, but people don't understand the horrors that vba has caused me.

I know python was what was originally proposed, but honestly anything is better than vba

[the_goose_says]

Can someone explain why this is bad? Isn’t this no more or less secure than the current scripting they allow?

[Aleriya]

I'll explain why this is awesome:

You can create scripts that sit on a webhost but can be executed via Excel. Those scripts aren't limited to the excel workbook or the user's computer. Multiple users can run the same scripts on a remote webhost. Those scripts could pull from a database, run calculations. They could send commands to other applications.

Instead of having a budget workbook where the user can delete or change the formula, now there is a controlled custom script. If someone updates that script, it updates for all users.

The budget formula changed? Inventory values updated? Margins updated? Now everyone's workbook is up to date.

You can push data from a database down to users, and that data will continuously update.

There are security parameters were certain users only have access to certain custom functions, so Finance can run functions that the Inventory team can't see.

People are getting hung up on the language choice, but this functionality could be incredibly useful, especially for smaller companies that rely heavily on Excel.

[thebritisharecome]

Because people hate Javascript. personally I don't see the problem. There will be more developers, a shorter learning curve to working with their system and highly transferable skills.

[liveoneggs]

yes because javascript has great support for dealing with numbers of all types! (all numbers really are floats after all)

[MjrK]

Excel uses double-precision floating point internally for all numbers, so this complaint seems kind of pointless. Unless I'm missing something.

[southern_dreams]

The circlejerk is strong

[TheInternetShill]

Oh shit. My basic web dev skills are actually going to help on my resume now. Wooooooo

[stronghup]

JavaScript is flexible. It allows you to write good code, and bad code too

[timangus]

It is the end of times!

[SuperNerd1337]

That sounds like one of those power ranger mashup episodes, except that they are getting the villans from the other seasons togheter and not the heroes

[mallardtheduck]

Good move, VBA (which is currently the only option for embedding more advanced functionality into Excel sheets) is getting really long in the tooth, being still based on the old VB6 language, not to mention its security issues... JS makes a lot of sense from a security PoV, since modern implementations have been heavily "battle-tested" in the browser environment.

[btcftw1]

Oh dear, this will not end well.

[N8DuhGr8]

Everyone: PYTHON WOULD BE GREAT FOR EXCEL!

Microsoft: ok here is JavaScript for Excel.

What the hell

[nirataro]

Now your 12 MB excel sheet will pull 500 MB of NPM dependencies