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I can see the case of just not wanting to build or bundle a python interpreter into Excel (since they’re not going make having python installed on a local machine a dependency). But the security issue can make sense I suppose from a certain point of view. Don’t agree with it, but I can understand it.
Also as a python dev, I fucking love python 😂
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.
Just the other day, we had to create a
requirements.txt
with a single character.
to get a tool to correctly install dependencies from ourpyproject.toml
. The tool only supports reading fromrequirements.txt
andsetup.py
, but we had apyproject.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.