
Clojure Development Environment for Excel - uaaa
https://github.com/whamtet/Excel-REPL
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S4M
Also to call various programming (there is no Clojure listed amongst the
supported languages, but Java is so it should be easy to build a bridge):
[http://xlloop.sourceforge.net/](http://xlloop.sourceforge.net/)

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mattdeboard
Wow this is actually really cool. Like if I had to work in Excel regularly I'd
use this in a heartbeat.

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mraison
That's awesome. I'm wondering if there's a way to make this work with Excel
for OSX. It sounds unlikely but I hope to be surprised.

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SixSigma
Here's the same thing with Python for Windows & Mac

[http://xlwings.org/](http://xlwings.org/)

You can share the sheets too as it bundles a runtime

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thalesmello
Projects like this are really cool in terms of providing different tools for
when you need to work with Excel. However, I don't see tools like this or for
any other language being widely adopted.

Here is why:

1 - Most of the times, people are going to use Excel for basic data analysis
with the built-in functions.

2 - If you need to do more complex tasks, you have two options:

* You know Clojure, Python or other programming language so you use the default environment for these languages to accomplish the task you need, or

* you know or learn VBA and stick with it because it's already built-in with Excel.

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S4M
I used to work in the financial industry where _lots_ of things are built in
excel, and I have my fair share of VBA programming. What I can tell you is:

1\. VBA is aweful. Sure it can communicate well with the spreadsheet, but the
language is quite bad, and so is the IDE. You can't write anything
complicated. 2\. Excel is really good if you want to do some calculations, and
it allows you to build something user interface-like really quickly.

So building some models in Excel works fine as long as whatever you want to do
is contained in the built-in functions or is not too complicated to be made in
VBA, but passed a certain point in complexity, you really want to use another
language. Banks have some addins in C++ or C# to export their own functions to
excel, and really being able to call a more flexible language like Clojure can
simplify life.

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cm2187
What would be really great is the equivalent of the VBA editor for C# and
VB.net (there is already one for F#). With roslyn now open source I hope it
will dignificantly lower the bar for someone to create it.

In fact Microsoft did create it (VSTA) but then killed it before it could make
its way to office. I have no idea of why they think users are better off with
VBA, a language that hasn't been updated in 15 years.

