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I have to say I am very disappointed in the information, after the title got me so excited. No announcements about Excel? I really hope R lands in Excel, it wi

I have to say I am very disappointed in the information, after the title got me so excited. No announcements about Excel? I really hope R lands in Excel, it will open big opportunities for developers and businesses. Also there was a guy from MS, who created python tools for VS and asked if anyone would want R tools for VS. After receiving a very warm response, never heard from him again. What's up with that? Parallel to that RA has an IDE, which uses the VS shell. Will we have more streamlined R workflow in VS? This is important for a lot of people... What about R.NET?

Ntrails 11y ago
If R lands in excel we can see even more proliferation of unstable excel "applications" with unmaintainable VBA, hard (if not impossible) to follow logic all wrapped up in a program where the next release might flat out break everything. Unless microsoft address some of the core issues with using excel as a "tools" platform - I'd prefer they didn't encourage it any more than they already do.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  You're exaggerating, for sure.
  - Ntrails 11y ago
    I'm probably underselling it actually. Since excel 2013 came out several spreadsheets which used to function in 2010 no longer do, and anything over ~50mb has become significantly less stable. I've spent literally days debugging excel tools with VBA split all around between sheets, modules, classes etc with no documentation. Not to mention that additional logic lives in the various formulae inside worksheets (which may or may not be dynamically updated multiple times during code execution and then trigger a worksheet_changed macro). The value of source control is pretty limited for an excel sheet, and I've been in a situation whereby a source controlled sheet could no longer be saved without excel crashing. The end solution was to copy all of the modules/sheets/extraneous code into a new workbook. A highly manual process. It appeared to work - but good luck proving I didn't screw it up. Links to other workbooks are significantly more unstable in 2013 (they're probably a terrible idea anyway, but the company considers it the best way to affirm the data being used for calculations is right). Excel 2013 launches differently to 2010 breaking every excel tool which relied on launch args. I can probably find a bunch of other reasons that excel is something that literally gives me nightmares. I'm not exaggerating, and based on a few conversations with people in various finance companies this is far from isolated to myself and my company.
    - blumkvist 11y ago
      >and based on a few conversations with people in various finance companies this is far from isolated to myself and my company. Exactly my point. You just like to pride yourself in how much you know and the 'proper way to do things'. If you dig deep enough to the core of the Earth, you will find a win98 machine, running Excel. How bad can it be, if the Earth runs on it?
smortaz 11y ago
hi there - it took a while to make our 1st hire, but i'm happy to report that work is underway as part of the Azure ML group. as soon the project has a pulse i'll post on HN. current plan is to have it be free & open source like Python Tools for Visual Studio. i'm also hiring for the project, so if you're into dev tools (editors, debuggers, profilers, languages, ...) and looking, pls drop me a line. looking for devs and a technical PM. re R.Net - no effort that i know of.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  Glad to hear you are making progress then! Can't help you with development. but I will be more than happy to beta test. I make analytics applications, encapsulated in asp.net and additionally use R for market research.

Ntrails 11y ago

If R lands in excel we can see even more proliferation of unstable excel "applications" with unmaintainable VBA, hard (if not impossible) to follow logic all wrapped up in a program where the next release might flat out break everything. Unless microsoft address some of the core issues with using excel as a "tools" platform - I'd prefer they didn't encourage it any more than they already do.

blumkvist 11y ago
You're exaggerating, for sure.
- Ntrails 11y ago
  I'm probably underselling it actually. Since excel 2013 came out several spreadsheets which used to function in 2010 no longer do, and anything over ~50mb has become significantly less stable. I've spent literally days debugging excel tools with VBA split all around between sheets, modules, classes etc with no documentation. Not to mention that additional logic lives in the various formulae inside worksheets (which may or may not be dynamically updated multiple times during code execution and then trigger a worksheet_changed macro). The value of source control is pretty limited for an excel sheet, and I've been in a situation whereby a source controlled sheet could no longer be saved without excel crashing. The end solution was to copy all of the modules/sheets/extraneous code into a new workbook. A highly manual process. It appeared to work - but good luck proving I didn't screw it up. Links to other workbooks are significantly more unstable in 2013 (they're probably a terrible idea anyway, but the company considers it the best way to affirm the data being used for calculations is right). Excel 2013 launches differently to 2010 breaking every excel tool which relied on launch args. I can probably find a bunch of other reasons that excel is something that literally gives me nightmares. I'm not exaggerating, and based on a few conversations with people in various finance companies this is far from isolated to myself and my company.
  - blumkvist 11y ago
    >and based on a few conversations with people in various finance companies this is far from isolated to myself and my company. Exactly my point. You just like to pride yourself in how much you know and the 'proper way to do things'. If you dig deep enough to the core of the Earth, you will find a win98 machine, running Excel. How bad can it be, if the Earth runs on it?

smortaz 11y ago

hi there - it took a while to make our 1st hire, but i'm happy to report that work is underway as part of the Azure ML group. as soon the project has a pulse i'll post on HN. current plan is to have it be free & open source like Python Tools for Visual Studio. i'm also hiring for the project, so if you're into dev tools (editors, debuggers, profilers, languages, ...) and looking, pls drop me a line. looking for devs and a technical PM. re R.Net - no effort that i know of.

blumkvist 11y ago
Glad to hear you are making progress then! Can't help you with development. but I will be more than happy to beta test. I make analytics applications, encapsulated in asp.net and additionally use R for market research.