Python coming to excel

[Cmaier]

25 years ago I would’ve been all over this.

Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel

Python code will run on Microsoft’s Cloud.

www.theverge.com

 

[Roller]

Glad to hear this. John Cleese is one of my favorite comedians.

 

[dada_dave]

Yeah I saw a bunch of security researchers joking around how they should “pour one out for their poor colleagues at Microsoft” who will have to deal with all new classes of errors.

 

[KingOfPain]

It sounded interesting, until I read "cloud-based"...

 

[Cmaier]

It sounded interesting, until I read "cloud-based"...

Yeah, that’s pretty weird.

I prefer Perl, anyway

 

[dada_dave]

Yeah, that’s pretty weird.

I prefer Perl, anyway

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh …. kill it with fire! But seriously, I am so glad bioinformatics was switching to Python when I started.

 

[KingOfPain]

I prefer Perl, anyway

A long time ago I wrote a somewhat long Perl skript, because I needed pattern matching. It wasn't pretty...
Nowadys I prefer Python for small skripts that I need to use occasionally.

Microsoft should have gone with Lua; much better to embed.

 

[Cmaier]

A long time ago I wrote a somewhat long Perl skript, because I needed pattern matching. It wasn't pretty...
Nowadys I prefer Python for small skripts that I need to use occasionally.

Microsoft should have gone with Lua; much better to embed.

Me and a couple buddies wrote a massive perk/tk chip viewer that would even let you drag wires or cells around and see the affect on maximum clock speed as you moved stuff. It was amazing. We were so dumb.

(We rewrote version 2 in c++, and embedded Perl in it so it could be used as a scripting language).

 

[mr_roboto]

Perl is so much worse as a language design but the Perl interpreter is a product of mad genius. It's so much faster than Python at lots of things.

 

[Nycturne]

Microsoft should have gone with Lua; much better to embed.

Lua may be easier to embed, but it runs up against the app store rules (last time I was researching something like this). Pushing it into the cloud makes it something that can be used on any client (Mobile, Web, Desktop), and using Python lines up with the data science folks that have decided that Python is where they are doing all their work.

If you really want something easy to embed everywhere these days, it's JavaScript. For better or worse. Mostly worse.

 

[theorist9]

When I was a grad student I was doing biomolecule calculations using a program I'd written in Perl. But as the molecules got bigger the programs began taking too long, so I switched to C++, and was amazed (since I didn't have a lot of real-world experience working with interpreted vs. compiled languages at the time) that C++ was literally 50x faster. I would actually have preferred using Fortran, but the program needed to dowload biomolecule info. from an NIH database, and also run a few external programs and capture their output. And (at the time) Fortran couldn't do one or both of those (I forget which).

 

[KingOfPain]

Lua may be easier to embed, but it runs up against the app store rules (last time I was researching something like this).

I hadn't considered this point. Thanks for your insight.