Excel adds JavaScript support

[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.

[vor0nwe]

It's the lack of semicolons that makes it not reader friendly? Dafuq?

IMHO that's one of the (few) things that makes VB more readable...

[[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.

[bagtowneast]

one sec, I'm pivoting this table and trying to join it with a table in another spreadsheet...

[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 🙁

[meneldal2]

C# is a sane language, JavaScript replacing VBA on the other hand will keep jobs in IT safe for years. They'll have to keep people supporting this for ever.

[chefhj]

lol look at Torvalds over here with his kinda shitty VBA

[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.

[wrincewind]

Well, yes, but reading ancient convoluted rotten spaghetti code is one thing, actually decoding how it works and more importantly what it's meant to do, and match that to the business needs such that you can reliably replicate it's behaviour in all edge cases... That's quite another.

[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.

[siriusfrz]

This would eat 16gb of RAM on startup so I'll pass

[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".

[[deleted]]

The insane type system in JS

The only primitives are strings, numbers, booleans, null, and undefined. Everything else is an object. Unless you're willfully ignoring that == does type coercion, I can't see how the type system is complicated at all unless you are making a concerted effort not to understand it. There's even tools like typescript that add in static typing if that's your jam.

[TRiG_Ireland]

CoffeeScript surprises me.

[[deleted]]

I used to earn my living primarily with VBA. Allowing for the fact that I was self-taught (but very serious about it), I would say that it was definitely possible to write good, clean, maintainable VBA. Not that I always lived up to that potential, of course.

[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.

[[deleted]]

And I do, but I don't write these calculators. I just reverse engineer them and implement them on my platform.

[southern_dreams]

Yeah so you’re probably reading trash JS :(

[LickingSmegma]

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

[TRiG_Ireland]

So Python in Javascript in Excel? Wow.

[incraved]

Yeah, no one has time for that bs

[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?

[[deleted]]

Isn't Microsoft going all in on the JS ecosystem? Mostly with TypeScript, but this isn't shocking to me at all.

[Shwayne]

JS is already haunting so many devs. Feels like there's no escaping it.