An absolute no-brainer. Python is the new BASIC - very popular with people who have to program to do their work but aren't programmers. It's an excellent choice for a spreadsheet.
Also extremely popular with people who are programmers and need to do things.
Sorry, this is a frustration of mine lately. Python is a fantastic introductory language. It's also a fantastic general purpose language.
Newbies get turned off of it because it feels too easy, and they know that "real" programming is supposed to be hard.
No true scottsman etc.
Python is great for scripting and for small projects, but I believe strong, static typing is an essential feature for large scale projects. I wouldn't want to use Python for anything that's predicted to end up with more than a couple thousand lines of code.
Python programming is an aesthetic that needs learning. Many of the worst written, and least maintainable python codebases I've seen are by programmers/teams coming from "proper" languages and don't think they have to learn how to write idiomatic python.
"So, the sad thing is that these poor folks worked much, much harder than they needed to, in order to produce much more code than they needed to write, that then performs much more slowly than the equivalent idiomatic Python would."
Best example I've seen was from a couple of Java devs transitioning to python, they re-wrote a system 3 times: 1st time: 35k loc 2nd time: 10k 3rd: 2k
The third rewrite was also significantly faster than the first two :)
I included a link to this blog-post in the "letter of intent" (don't know the exact English term) that I sent to my potential employer just before my first interview for a professional (Python) programmer job, back in 2005. I got the job. Good times.
This is empirically false.
There are (of course!) good reasons to consider static typing. But, in my experience, use of static typing has never been a first-order predictor of business or technology success. It's quite possible to build considerable value with, for example, a large Python 2.x code base.
A fun, and tangentially related, talk: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/ideology
In my view, classes are types. (Well, maybe I'm just spoiled by C++.)
I understand the word "type" to mean a property of a variable which restricts the range of values it can hold, and the set of methods which can be invoked on it. Smalltalk doesn't have any way to do either of those things, so it has no types.
Interestingly, it seems that this was planned for Smalltalk, but never implemented; a 1981 article about the design of Smalltalk [1] says:
"Also, message protocols have not been formalized. The organization provides for protocols, but it is currently only a matter of style for protocols to be consistent from one class to another. This can be remedied easily by providing proper protocol objects that can be consistently shared. This will then allow formal typing of variables by protocol without losing the advantages of polymorphism."
[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....
For example, nullability annotations reduce nil pointer exceptions.
Static typing removes the need to make certain typing unit tests, makes refactors easier to do in large code bases, makes it easier for compilers to generate faster code and so on. Think of them as compiler level linters.
Anyway, python has a static gradual typing mechanism. You should try it out :D
> big boon
But they argued ‘essential’. You’ve watered that down to nice-to-have.
Most used: everyone pays taxes. Paying taxes is popular!
A more practical example is javascript. I write some javascript, not because I like it (I hate it), but because that's the only way to make things happen in a browser. Javascript is popular. Does it mean it is liked / a good language?
No it does not, neither in theory nor in practice. Also, "less code" depends primarily on the language structure and not on whether the language is dynamically typed or not. (Haskell, for example, is more terse than Python.)
I've yet to come across something that was fewer loc in C++/java than in python.
That said, this is true even if I use pytype.
Edit: I suppose my point got a little lost. What I mean is that I highly doubt much Excel code is a "big project." It may feel that way when you crawl through some of the hideous VBA coding I've done but much of this is due to the inexperience of the coder and the realities of VBA. Give me python + 4 or 5 libraries and I could recode anything I've ever made in VBA in 1000 lines or less.
I understand, though: you hate VBA. And by extension, Access. But Excel, with or without Python, doesn't mean it can suddenly be used as a relational database. But you knew that.
So, what should replace Access?
You mean like Dropbox, Evernote, Ansible, OpenStack etc.
Every sufficiently large test suite will contain an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a proper type system.
(I too enjoy a good pseudo-Greenspun)
More seriously something I've been pondering a lot recently watching the old pendulum swing back towards an enthusiasm for explicit typing is this:
* The advantages of static type systems are obvious and easy to articulate. * The disadvantages of static type systems are subtle and difficult to argue.
I started my career as a professional programmer when the pendulum was moving in the other direction. Essays by Paul Graham on Lisp and Python. The marvellous PJ Eby piece quoted above and Peter Norvig's "Design Patterns are artifacts of language flaws".
I just feel dynamic languages fit my brain better but maybe that's my own form of Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe I need to try a decent type system rather than the brain-damaged descendents of Java...
After some time doing that a Java project came up, so I grabbed Lombok, Vavr and started writing Java as if it was just another ML (immutability first, paying attention to side effects and so on) and the whole thing made sense. More sense than all those years of OOP teachings. The code was easy to debug, easy to reason about, easy to change. And it was Java. And that just stunned me for life.
Then of course, I started using TypeScript for React development and giggled like a little girl every time I had to refactor something, for I KNEW that it was very unlikely I'd have to stare at the debugger for long periods of time in a wild goose chase like I often had to with plain JS.
But the trick was to learn the way of doing things in the languages that really guide you towards that path.
I can definitely recommend that you try Elm if you're into frontend development, or something like F# if you want native. As far as docs go, the Elm guide and fsharpforfunandprofit.com are both great; the latter I can recommend regardless of your language choice for making typed functional programming make sense. I can also recommend the book Type-Driven Development with Idris, which has also been an invaluable resource to really understand that way of doing things.
You're testing things that need testing either way, and incidentally also testing the types.
However, it tests values for correctness. Values have types. So if you are testing whether something has the correct value, you are also testing implicitly that it has the correct type, because for the values to match, the types must also match.
Anyway, I doubt that a VBA replacement would need types. The use case is small scripts.
There's room for both paradigms - it's kinda silly to argue strict superiority of either because there's just no empirical evidence that having static typing or not drastically changes bug count.
If you take a look at some of the studies out there that do exist (which there are, admittedly, few, and it's a fundamentally tough thing to measure), e.g. [0], it usually tends to be the case the both typed and untyped languages show up in the realm of "least likely to produce bugs"
[0] http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~filkov/papers/lang_github.pdf
That's what the vast majority of testing is when it isn't simply testing mock code implementations.
Put me with Op. I'll use Python for prototypes and small tools but get past that and I want a statically typed language. Not just for validation but also refactoring.
Python is strongly typed and has an available static typechecker, so, even if this is true, it doesn't rule out Python for this use case.
I would hate a typed language in there. Besides most static typing systems are ridiculously weak and introduce more headaches than they actually solve.
With some of the spreadsheets I've seen, the next Netflix might just come out of it.
Just kidding, but only a bit. I've been at factories where if VBA stopped working, I literally don't know if we could have produced product that day.
E.g. Go (and I still love Go, but it's pretty weak...)
My only complaint about Pytype is that there's no `Char` type at compile time (ie `for x in "a string"` -> Iterable[Char] instead of Iterable[str] during typechecking). But alas.
Write a Python program. Compile it as a Cython program. (Already faster, with no changes.) Add C types to the speed-critical parts. (Up to many 100s of times faster than Python)
On the flip side, i use interfaces and dependency injection constantly in java to work around static typing. In python, i write probably ~20% the amount of code because i never use interfaces, wiring logic or convert types.
because it has no long term potential
Not everyone likes IDEs (Emacs and VIM are still by far superior to many) and not everyone wants to deal with all the extra code and boilerplate and ad-hoc data classes that comes with static typing, to name a few.
Dynamic languages have faster iteration times and from experience that can yield higher quality software. They're easier to fit in the functional paradigm, better to model data transformations, and a bunch of other goodies.
You can't judge something without taking into account the context in which its used. And for scripting something like Excel dynamic is clearly superior.
You may like plain text editor but for someone who doesn't know how to program, typing a variable then dot, and having a drop down of what is available from there, with an embedded documentation and direct IDE feedback on what is correct or incorrect syntax immediately after typing every character is super useful. RTFM isn't novice friendly.
Its still possible for dynamic languages to have auto-completion. There's way more information available at runtime than at compile-time.
Besides, IDEs tend to have the entire world in most autocompletions, which is not useful either.
There would be no IDE here, you'll probably still write code from within Excel and advanced users will use separate source files to leverage their editor of choice.
The novices you mention will not want to leave Excel. A dynamic runtime with reflection is all you need to give a friendly experience. That doesn't prevent type hints, inference or autocompletion.
You'd be hardpressed to reinvent excel in a browser. Sheets is a big, advanced web app but it doesn't even come close.
It also allows a developer to manipulate individual bits, which is pretty amazing for security research or other cases when you want to get low level but don't want to get in the weeds with C.
Why do you find it so fantastic? What stands out for you?
Python was my first real programming language, but I don't see anything very attractive about it now - save the libraries.
I would even say it would fit better, not because the language is better, but because indentation wouldn't go in the way for quick & dirty one-offs.