this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
110 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37719 readers
97 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Since its inception, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the flying billionaires heads up in the clouds who don't give a fuck for life off~~the~~line

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dax@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They could easily vendor python in the excel distribution if they wanted to, though. In fact, it would be the smart thing to do from their perspective; expecting people to keep up to date python versions (and what counts as up to date and what counts as a needless forced upgrade just from typing import List for your typehints turns into : list is super plausibly arguable.)

I can't love python after all the pain and suffering I've had to go through packaging things from extension modules. I've never had a worse experience with computers, and I used to write coldfusion and java swing for money, so that's fucking saying something. The entire distutils ->setuptools->build/PEP517 + bdist vs. sdist is the least gratifying work in my entire career, by far. It's not even interesting, it's just shockingly poorly documented and your only plausible solution is "try literally everything and see which things work". I shouldn't have to fucking emulate a quantum computer just to ship a fucking bdist.

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Just the other day, we had to create a requirements.txt with a single character . to get a tool to correctly install dependencies from our pyproject.toml. The tool only supports reading from requirements.txt and setup.py, but we had a pyproject.toml with configurations for many of the other tools we use.

I keep wanting to think it's improving over time, but the reality seems to be simpler than that. It's just changing over time. That being said, type hints were a welcome addition, and occasionally they add new features that make sense. They also add features like the walrus operator, but we don't talk about those.