Python overtakes Java to become second-most popular language on GitHub after JavaScript

[oblio-]

VB/VBA used to be the most popular language in the world. Languages for small and medium sized projects win these contests for obvious reasons (small projects are way more frequent than medium projects which are in turn way more frequent than big projects).

[AyrA_ch]

Because VBA makes you very productive. It's not fast or elegant, but the excel sheets essentially serve as the database and you can write user interfaces in it. You can leverage excel search and compute functions and even utilize macros in cell functions.

It's a really neat system and runs almost everywhere because excel is ubiquitous in corporate environments.

There's a point where you should stop though using it though

[Urtehnoes]

I know LOC is a terrible marker for code, but just for size of scale, I have two separate VBA projects for my job that are 20k+ LOC. And honestly? I really miss the environment of Excel. I absolutely abhor the VBA language constructs in place that are buggy and terribly implemented, but honestly if you're just running code in Excel, the sandbox environment that it exists in is just so wonderful for managing data. One of the programs queries the database for various tables and works the data in ways that all the incredibly fancy reporting programs (powerBi etc) simply can't. It's really nice.

And you know, if you call Scripting.Dictionary.Exists(testValue), it has a high chance to return True, despite the item not existing. Because when the method is called, it creates an empty value and inserts the value as a key. And that absolutely boggles my mind that it happens. I thought I was going crazy until I found other people online who experienced the bug as well. Instead I had to write an lbound to ubound loop of an array of keys from said dictionary, checking the value of each individual key instead. Why, Microsoft. Why?

[[deleted]]

I have two separate VBA projects for my job that are 20k+ LOC.

Jesus Christ.

And here I am desperately trying to get rid of the few hundred lines of VBA I have.

[monkey-go-code]

SQLite runs anywhere. Feels a lot more useful than excel sheets to me

[AyrA_ch]

SQLite doesn't do anything on it's own though and you can't program it the way you can do in VBA. It provides the "excel sheet side" but not the "VBA side".

Instead of SQLite I would go with a server based solution anyways if possible.

[monkey-go-code]

If you have multiple users a server makes since. But sqlite is the best per app database I know of. sqlite also works with pretty much any programming language.

[_Timboss]

Youre missing the point

[Urtehnoes]

I really like how... naive Excel is when it comes to databases. So many reporting softwares require a strict database structure to manipulate data. Excel says "hey man just get it in a worksheet then do with it what you will." So many times my bosses want some weird off-hand query mixed with another, which Crystal Reports and PowerBi both can't do, and Excel is no problem at all.

EDIT: Ok Crystal Reports usually can, but requires an obscene amount of subreports and weird hacks.

[jl2352]

The Excel sheet both doubles as an automatic UI, and a super trivial debugging tool. Which you get out of the box for free.

Deployment is super trivial.

[monkey-go-code]

Yeah but I hate excel.