Microsoft is bringing popular programming language Python to Excel. A public preview of the feature is available today, allowing Excel users to manipulate and analyze data from Python.
You won’t need to install any additional software or set up an add-on to access the functionality, as Python integration in Excel will be part of Excel’s built-in connectors and Power Query. Microsoft is also adding a new PY function that allows Python data to be exposed within the grid of an Excel spreadsheet. Through a partnership with Anaconda, an enterprise Python repository, popular Python libraries like pandas, statsmodels, and Matplotlib will be available in Excel.
You do realize that in 2020 Microsoft hired Guido van Rossum who then resigned from Python steering committee elections?
How would you even embrace, extend & extinguish an insanely popular programming language? For what purpose?
Remember this? Remember that time Google and Apple entered web standard organisations to pump out harmful APIs?
The extinguish part isn’t necessarily about literally wiping out a project.
You don’t need to convince me web is currently at risk of repeat of what we had in late 90s. It doesn’t really have many similarities to what’s happening here because corporate entities are in almost complete power over JS interpreters/compilers due to how web browsers are in position to capture market.
What Microsoft does here is adding another scripting language to Excel because VBA is outdated shitshow that creates enormous barrier of entry for millions of people that could get way more out of their flagship product. There is a genuine benefit to Microsoft and Excel users to add Python scripting.
Python is a general purpose / glue language for countless useful libraries and APIs. Excel will be one of many big fishes in that pond, among Tensorflow by Google, PyTorch by Meta and plenty of others. There’s nothing to be gained from breaking Python here. There’s also no room to strong arm non-corporate part of Python world into anything because we’re not married to any particular implementation.
Microsoft, like most big corporations, is Inherently evil, but not every single thing they do is evil. I’ve worked in enough big corporations to know that they’re so disorganized that you should look at what particular departament does because left hand doesn’t really know what right hand does. Excel team has been incredibly customer facing and deserves benefit of the doubt.