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That's the kind of answers I was looking for. Does the nature of Excel VBA limits the possibilities of making it simple ? The fact of it being all about the en

by zrz 13y ago

That's the kind of answers I was looking for. Does the nature of Excel VBA limits the possibilities of making it simple ? The fact of it being all about the environment means to me that there is room for what I called 'concept-comprehension at the syntactic level'. I mean, I can see myself manipulating Ranges and Arrays in a lot more intuitive way, and that's, in my short experience, the main use of macros. Come on, Excel is a spreadsheet software, it's basically meant to be use for numeric arrays manipulation and it does not offers any syntactic sugar around array manipulation.

bdfh42 13y ago
After a bit of thought, I acknowledge that you could conceive of a new language with better syntax that had the modern bells and whistles with the added capacity to view spreadsheets and their cells as a standard data type and with one of the target output windows being a standard Excel spreadsheet. I am not sure that you would then want to compile that down to VBA though - that would be rather "downhill" after all of the effort developing new tools. This http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ was an attempt to start again from a language perspective (Python here) but I suspect you are looking for something that would just drop in alongside the ubiquitous Excel without making the less technical user aware of the difference.
gruseom 13y ago
If you want to write code to manipulate numeric arrays, why not use an existing high-level language that is good for this? In other words, why are you using Excel? Not suggesting that you shouldn't; just curious to hear what benefits Excel has for you that keep you using it past its sweet spot.
- zrz 13y ago
  Writing VBA code for users that can't is part of my everyday job, and I guess that it is the job of a lot of support/commando developers. Excel is a great tool foto implement simple investment strategies but it often ends like 'hey could you write what we are trying to do in VBA ?', and most of the time it can be done. But I have that feeling that writing VBA costs more than it should, that VBA is playing against the developer while any other language makes him feel like there's no limits.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    What kinds of things are they trying to do that you end up implementing in VBA for them? Do you ever have the feeling that some of these things ought to be doable in Excel without having to resort to VBA? (I ask because I'm working on a product in this space.)
    - zrz 13y ago
      Mostly functions that could be achieved with Excel formulas, but would require to add some more columns. As we are already struggling with file size, we often go with VBA implementation. I'm talking about calculating things like drawdowns in series, and other timeseries properties. We compared both implementation (Formulas ad VBA) and most of the time, VBA is several times faster, and reduces chances of application freeze; So we are not even discussing the need for VBA in the team.

by zrz 13y ago

bdfh42 13y ago

After a bit of thought, I acknowledge that you could conceive of a new language with better syntax that had the modern bells and whistles with the added capacity to view spreadsheets and their cells as a standard data type and with one of the target output windows being a standard Excel spreadsheet. I am not sure that you would then want to compile that down to VBA though - that would be rather "downhill" after all of the effort developing new tools. This http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ http://manns.github.io/pyspread/ was an attempt to start again from a language perspective (Python here) but I suspect you are looking for something that would just drop in alongside the ubiquitous Excel without making the less technical user aware of the difference.

gruseom 13y ago

If you want to write code to manipulate numeric arrays, why not use an existing high-level language that is good for this? In other words, why are you using Excel? Not suggesting that you shouldn't; just curious to hear what benefits Excel has for you that keep you using it past its sweet spot.

zrz 13y ago
Writing VBA code for users that can't is part of my everyday job, and I guess that it is the job of a lot of support/commando developers. Excel is a great tool foto implement simple investment strategies but it often ends like 'hey could you write what we are trying to do in VBA ?', and most of the time it can be done. But I have that feeling that writing VBA costs more than it should, that VBA is playing against the developer while any other language makes him feel like there's no limits.
- gruseom 13y ago
  What kinds of things are they trying to do that you end up implementing in VBA for them? Do you ever have the feeling that some of these things ought to be doable in Excel without having to resort to VBA? (I ask because I'm working on a product in this space.)
  - zrz 13y ago
    Mostly functions that could be achieved with Excel formulas, but would require to add some more columns. As we are already struggling with file size, we often go with VBA implementation. I'm talking about calculating things like drawdowns in series, and other timeseries properties. We compared both implementation (Formulas ad VBA) and most of the time, VBA is several times faster, and reduces chances of application freeze; So we are not even discussing the need for VBA in the team.