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The crucial difference with VBA is its openness and community-driven evolution. VBA is stewarded and designed almost entirely by Microsoft whereas there are man
by rusk 8y ago
The crucial difference with VBA is its openness and community-driven evolution. VBA is stewarded and designed almost entirely by Microsoft whereas there are many many stakeholders involved in Javascript, and it's certified by an independent body and has lots of different variants that complement each other. Also it has many "cousins" such as actionscript or swift which you can get up to speed quite quickly in once you know JS. I don't believe VBA has the same degree of transferable skills.
- dx034 8y agoExactly that. I recently started programming JS again after not using it for a while and was surprised about some of the new language features. It certainly develops in the right direction, IMO. VBA, on the other hand, hasn't really changed at all over the past decades. It's still as annoying as it can be with no help from the IDE. That's helpful as scripts from Office XP usually run with only minor edits but it also means that flaws annoying a decade ago are now much more severe. Luckily, we'll get JS on Office, although it'll probably take another decade until a reasonable share of companies have upgraded to a version that supports it.