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Microsoft announces Python formulas in Excel... which have to get sent to the cloud (techcommunity.microsoft.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don't give a fuck for life off~~the~~line

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can see the case of just not wanting to build or bundle a python interpreter into Excel (since they're not going make having python installed on a local machine a dependency). But the security issue can make sense I suppose from a certain point of view. Don't agree with it, but I can understand it.

Also as a python dev, I fucking love python 😂

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could easily vendor python in the excel distribution if they wanted to, though. In fact, it would be the smart thing to do from their perspective; expecting people to keep up to date python versions (and what counts as up to date and what counts as a needless forced upgrade just from typing import List for your typehints turns into : list is super plausibly arguable.)

I can't love python after all the pain and suffering I've had to go through packaging things from extension modules. I've never had a worse experience with computers, and I used to write coldfusion and java swing for money, so that's fucking saying something. The entire distutils ->setuptools->build/PEP517 + bdist vs. sdist is the least gratifying work in my entire career, by far. It's not even interesting, it's just shockingly poorly documented and your only plausible solution is "try literally everything and see which things work". I shouldn't have to fucking emulate a quantum computer just to ship a fucking bdist.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Just the other day, we had to create a requirements.txt with a single character . to get a tool to correctly install dependencies from our pyproject.toml. The tool only supports reading from requirements.txt and setup.py, but we had a pyproject.toml with configurations for many of the other tools we use.

I keep wanting to think it's improving over time, but the reality seems to be simpler than that. It's just changing over time. That being said, type hints were a welcome addition, and occasionally they add new features that make sense. They also add features like the walrus operator, but we don't talk about those.