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Comment by Ididntdothis | Hacker News Reader

Most potential users of VBA don’t know JavaScript or any other language. And VB is way more accessible than JavaScript.

On that I agree... Python would probably be a better option if there weren't a need for cross platform support including in-browser. Also, I'm not sure if there's a good path from Python to JS or Wasm for browser usage.

I love JS, but it's not that accessible and a poor first language for people. I just enjoy the shear flexibility of it.

Sure, but it's not as big as an ecosystem. Knowing JavaScript at this point is way more valuable than learning VBA. I'm not saying VBA is bad, I think visual basic is great, I have fond memories of it, but reality is JavaScript is going to be what companies are going to want their employees to know.

Can JavaScript use COM libraries and windows APIs? The JavaScript ecosystem is big but I doubt it covers much of what a typical VBA application needs. I think C# or another .Net language would be more suitable.

If there isn't now, I imagine it will come. There's:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/windows-runt...

I'm sure Microsoft is probably at least considering making JavaScript work well with existing Windows APIs.

I think that's deprecated. They dropped support for UWP apps with JavaScript in Visual Studio 2019:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ebb5e04b-d00a...

My guess is that they will retire from having to program one day.

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