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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

I'm a not-very-technical (I can do some coding) co-founder, but I've always been pissed off that Excel doesn't use a normal programming language because I think I'd pickup that language so quickly!

Anyone else interested in something like this? I just stumbled across it and wanted to get people's thoughts.

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Funny you should mention that. I use Excel+Python extensively and have developed my own plugin for embedding Python in Excel. Basically it lets me easily write worksheet functions using Python, and also with some multiprocessing magic lets me calculate them in parallel (which VBA doesn't let you do).

I was debating whether I should clean it up enough to share it (or maybe even sell it!). Seems like there's some interest in this, so maybe I will.

You should! I really would prefer Python over VBA for my Excel programming.

http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/ (Cells) is a data flow language where values are determined by formulas similar to spreadsheets.

So instead of a spreadsheet with a programming language, go the other way around!

You don't even need to leave Python:

http://pycells.pdxcb.net/

It's worked for the various things I've done with it, but as far as I know it's not maintained.

Well, Excel does have VBA. Whether that's a "normal" programming language depends on your definition of "normal." You can do some very useful stuff in it, but you'll feel like you're fighting the language every step of the way.

Yeah, I've coded for Word since Word 6.0 in the mid-90's, and it has always been my feeling that Microsoft doesn't want to make things programmable so much as they want you to think things are programmable. It's a feeling that's hard to verbalize exactly.

I don't disagree with you at all, but that's what makes it even more strange that VB has become so much more popular than I expected for enterprise usage. Did Microsoft's marketing muscle pave the way, or were other tools really just too complex for what these people (business analysts, business logic developers, etc) needed?

Let's say you are a cubicle-dwellling enterprise schulb. You have a repetitive task to perform. Do you:

1) Spend 3 weeks requesting permission to install your favorite programming tools

2) Look around your Start Menu, suck it up and code it in Excel.

(That is ignoring VB's tight integration, first mover advantage, and the fact that an entire generation of kids grew up coding MS-BASIC.)

This takes me back to my last (long term) job. I got tapped to fix a departed worker's spaghetti code, and in the process, got VERY familiar with Excel VBA, to the point that I started goofing around with my own ideas. I must have dozens of "empty" spreadsheets with nothing but code in them. What's fun is, you can drag in just about any COM library on the system to play around with.

For a spreadsheet, Excel's a not-too-bad IDE!

It's 1994, Windows for Workgroups is on your computer connected to the other machines on the LAN via a Novell Network. No WAN. Word 6, Access 1.0, Excel 1.0. VBA is all you've got.

Yea, I did VB in high school, but it didn't take...

As I was Exceling it up tonight, and I thought to myself if I used Python as the spreadsheet language I'd be quite good by now. Excel feels like an extension of my body - I want Python to feel that way.

To be honest, my first thought was having a Scheme-based spreadsheet. I'm already used to lots of parenthesis and Excel script is sort of functional already. Not sure it'd work though.

I keep thinking that Python(Scheme?) + Spreadsheets = what Yahoo Pipes wishes it was. gDoc's ability to pull from APIs and data functions was a good step as well in this regard.

At least making programming a step closer for noobs like myself.

> To be honest, my first thought was having a Scheme-based spreadsheet. I'm already used to lots of parenthesis and Excel script is sort of functional already. Not sure it'd work though.

You may be interested in the "Siag" spreadsheet tool, which stands for "Scheme In A Grid": http://siag.nu/siag/

You can use Excel / Word as a COM object and use any language that does COM.

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