On: The Future of Excel

[niggler]

VBA is a surprisingly flexible language (although it does have many quirks) and is visually much cleaner than python.

Read the MS-VBAL spec: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd361851.aspx

[RyanMcGreal → niggler]

> and is visually much cleaner than python

I must respectfully disagree. Python is required to be visually clean by making indentation part of the syntax.

[niggler → RyanMcGreal]

visual cleanliness is not just about whitespace. There are other considerations like how well the clauses stand out:

    If x > 0 Then
        y = 3
    Else
        y = 4
    End If

is much easier to scan than

    if x > 0:
        y = 3
    else:
        y = 4

Even though there are more characters in the vb side, the fact that the blocks are explicitly ended give you a much better mental cue than merely shifting the whitespace indentation

[cturner → niggler]

It's probably subjective. I've always found capitalisation makes scanning harder.

VB was one of my early languages, and I recall trying to find a way to turn off VB capitalisation way-back-when when I was developing in it.

But it might be odd to me. Whenever I see a directory of C with a CVS directory, I feel a brief tension from all the shouting.

[RyanMcGreal → niggler]

I used to program in VB/VBA and switched to Python several years ago. As the other person who replied notes, 'visual cleanliness' is subjective, but I vastly prefer looking at Python to looking at VB/VBA, and I immediately began to prefer it on learning Python, despite having programmed in VB for several years previous.

Part of it is that you can communicate the same information with fewer tokens and in less space. My eyes don't have to jump around as much to figure out what's going on.