VBA Rubberducking

1:29 PM

@Freeflow here's the full text:

VBA is a horrible programming language. Microsoft themselves agree, and seem to have given up on it long ago.

But … how did it ever come to this? VBA has something no other language has: EXCEL.

Excel is a massively succesful product used by pretty much every company, every student, every professor, and even many civilians who just need a spreadsheet for personal budgetting, etc.

The ability to tie a programming language with Excel is so appealing, that you'd think that alone would be reason enough for Microsoft to maintain Excel. I mean, imagine if instead of Excel, VBA had something lik…

FreeMan

1:48 PM

@Vogel612 As I understand it, the Moderna vaccine is being used primarily in the US, last I saw there was about a 3% adverse event rate, and I've seen that in testing the Pfizer(?) vaccine had about a 21% adverse event rate. Sounds mighty rushed to me, but if you're up for being in the 20% that has a serious event because of the vaccine instead of the 0.00001% dying from the virus (you're in your 20s and generally healthy right? that's about your chance of dying), then go for it.

1 hour later…

Freeflow

3:14 PM

@Bigben Its a wonder why noone has written a replacement VBA module. One candidate would be the now nearly defunct Boo language. If folks don't know, Boo is/was a C#/VB.Net equivalent Net language used in Unity which was pythonish in syntax and formatting but could be interpreted or compiled.

4:00 PM

@Freeflow Interesting, never heard of it before.

@FreeMan "adverse event" != "serious event"

the adverse events are for the largest part common sideeffects of vaccinations. Headache, soreness, that's it

@Vogel612 I think you meant <> instead of != haha

@BigBen ah, no in fact I meant !== /s

lololol

~sighs in writing javascript for a living

4:04 PM

yuck

I'm in the second half of my twenties, generally healthy and I won't get the vaccine until in a few months with the current vaccination rules in germany

M.Doerner

5:02 PM

I am a bit older but still in the second to last group to get the vaccine; the last being all children too young to get it at all.

HackSlash

@Vogel612 so being a javascript developer what do you think of the push to use javascript in Excel online instead of VBA? I think replacing VBA with javascript or python is a terrible idea. I would like to see the Excel VBE interpreter become a CLR interpreter that can use VB.NET or C#. There would need to be some way to make VBA compile to CLR for backwards compatibility. Or maybe it would just have two different interpreters for different modules.

@HackSlash you're ignoring the push for Office365 in your question

as such office automation needs to be working against WebAssembly (or equivalent)

Not only that, the main problem Microsoft has with VBA is security.

there is no compiler that compiles VBA to WebASM

Using C# would still expose that.

HackSlash

5:08 PM

C# and VB.NET can use WebAssembly

and it's prohibitively expensive to port the VBA Runtime and the Office VBA Model to the web

let alone the issue around security, backwards-compat and COM interop that's in there

so in summary: Assuming Office365 is the future (which I hope it's not), pushing for JS and Python-based office automation is the obvious approach

~~why python?~~ can python run in webasm?

@this there are python to js transpilers

there's apparently a pretty big effort to get something like that working, as documented in this stack overflow answer

FWIW, we need to consider that VSTO was a big failure because it was not actually integrated. Nobody wanted to install Visual Studio just to write some macros. The VBA has absurdly low entry barrier.

Unrelated question: why can't Excel let me transpose data in-place? I have to select all cells, then select another cell before it lets me transpose, then I have to delete the original row?

Yep.

sucks, doesn't it.

5:18 PM

I swear, it used to be possible - you right-clicked and it would transpose in place.

IvenBach

Misremembered from a dream where all inputs are thoroughly sanitized.