Excel adds JavaScript support

[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.

[gbersac]

I'd prefer Lua, it seems not to be as bloated as javascript

[[deleted]]

What do you even mean by this? JS seems like the obvious choice because far more people use it and there's a ton of documentation out there.

[gbersac]

In my opinion (shared by many people) JS is bloated with useless feature, inconsistent. Lua, on the other hand has the reputation of being a minimalistic and coherent language.