I’m migrating some VBAs to python/pandas and reducing some process times from half an hour to 3 minutes.
Comment on Microsoft to kill off VBScript in Windows to block malware delivery
AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hope they kill off VBA too. I still see some teams in banks implementing Monte Carlo or PDE solvers in straight VBA 🤢
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yup that’s normal because VBA is single-threaded, doesn’t take advantage of vector instructions and even its interpreter is slow. So when someone writes numerical code in VBA working in single precision, and assuming they have an 8 core CPU with AVX2, they’re using only 1/64-th of their CPU’s processing power. On the other hand with Python, while it’s still interpreted, the interpreter is much faster on its own, and you have modules like
numpythat use precompiled routines that take advantage of vector instructions (and possibly multiple cores).Melkath@kbin.social 1 year ago
Yes. Python is a LOT more powerful. Requires a LOT technical knowledge to operate.
Are you making north of 150k to make your strife worth it?
Or are you raising the technical bar while also lowering the compensation bar?
Myself, I make 60k and my VBA gets the job done. Zero incentive to get into the minutia you just explained. My shit works. And I'm not set on fucking up the bell curve for everyone.
neshura@bookwormstory.social 1 year ago
bruv Python is so simple you barely need to know English to use it. Haven’t used VBA but I’ll just blindly guess it’s more difficult because honestly I have not seen a language that is easier to pick up than Python.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
Python is way easy lo learn that VBA imo, and is way more useful.
AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t know what your seniority is, but it’s cool if it works for you. However, to remain employable in case you someday get laid off (of course not wishing you that), it would be beneficial to have experience in a more modern language. To remain fixated on one single language/tech just because it works for you for now is going to cause you lots of pain in case you need to hit the job market again someday and it would be too late to learn new languages because, depending on your seniority again, recruiters won’t want someone who just began learning the language.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
Btw, Libreoffice supports python scripts. Other offices too?
lud@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Excel will kinda support it soon, unfortunately it will only be available to run in the cloud and not locally.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
I work in corporate, so it’s Microsoft all the way up.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
I have seen critical enterprise applications run in VBA in excel. Removing VBA would cause global economic ruin. I’m pretty sure that’s the unspoken backstory for the Fallout series.
Pistcow@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Can confirm. Worked at several billion dollar corps that would collapse without vba.
dill@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Can confirm as well. It’s wild
Dee@lemmings.world 1 year ago
Another Sys Admin confirming that yes, the finance department runs nearly entirely on VBA. They would be lost without it.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
I want to see that happen.
OldFartPhil@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Another confirmation here. At my previous job, I was they guy who built Access databases and wrote VBA code… While not ideal, it was a very small business (less than 10 employees) and it was fit for purpose.
When I got a new job at a company with almost 3,000 employees, I was like, “Finally, I’ll be working somewhere that has proper IT resources.” Ha! I soon find out that my department runs critical business infrastructure with Excel macros. And we have a proper IT department.
As everyone has already said, if IT resources are in short supply (or the wait is too long, or building projects with IT support is a PITA), then people will build systems with the tools they have at hand. And that’s often MS Office.
Melkath@kbin.social 1 year ago
Also remember, strictly speaking, IT is not software development. IT is networking and hardware management.
Software development (and scoff all you want, but VBS/VBA are programming languages/frameworks used to develop software applications) is its own separate beast.
The MAY report to the CIO. They could also report to the COO. Fuck, software development/process automation/business intelligence can have a director reporting directly to the CEO.
In general, software development and information technology are not the same and don't reside in the same chain of command.
HumbertTetere@feddit.de 1 year ago
Strictly speaking, information technology encompasses software dev as a subfield. Practically, a large software development at a company has very different needs and strategic goals than what people usually understand as the “IT guys” so what you mentioned. So they are set up accordingly in an organisation.
aev@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
With some of my smaller clients, the CIO is the same as the CTO and the same as the IT Director. There, IT is developers, too.
knobbysideup@lemm.ee 1 year ago
IT isn’t developers. What is really needed is a developer on your team, or somebody who at least knows how to lead the effort. I’ve been that guy.
OldFartPhil@lemm.ee 1 year ago
We do have developers on our team. They write Excel macros :). I work in data integration, so it isn’t as simple as building a more robust tool. We still need infrastructure support or our tool doesn’t do anything.
Melkath@kbin.social 1 year ago
My job is literally to keep a NASDAQ company afloat on process automation written mostly in VBA to make up for the sweeping layoffs that were made to keep the CEOs bonuses fat...
skeezix@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That type of bonus is usually called a “bone us”
HidingCat@kbin.social 1 year ago
WTF, seriously? VBA feels more like a scripting addon (which I suppose it is), not something to build wholesale CRITICAL programs with.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
They didn’t start out building an enterprise critical application, they normally started as some little script someone built to make their work faster. Then they shared it with the team, built more features, and 20 years later hundreds of staff are using it and if it dissappeared they would be screwed.
Plus the data in them is often the only record of critical data (in their defense, the spreadsheets are typically stored somewhere where the backup process will back them up).
magic_lobster_party@kbin.social 1 year ago
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s me, I’m that guy lmfao, although by the time I left it was considerably more complex. I have “real” languages under my belt, but it was a banking environment and VBA was all I had (Which even that kinda surprised me lol).
I was hooked into the windows API and doing all sorts of stuff and yea before leaving I did distribute stand alone parts of it (The full system was a beast, 90% of my job was automated towards the end lololol)
Honestly, VBA is more powerful than people give it credit for, just a PITA to implement some things
macallik@kbin.social 1 year ago
At my old job, we had a VBA script that would:
Thirty page custom reports per client within 2 minutes (when nothing broke). It allows you to interact and automate across the Microsoft Suite. That is one of the reasons why it is indispensable to many companies
HidingCat@kbin.social 1 year ago
This is definitely giving me flashbacks during my time in the corporate world. There was one report that was replete with copy and pasting, the poor lady who used to do it apparently had to pull all-nighters doing it. I rebuilt everything in Access using some SQL and the new process only took 15 minutes to run.
Melkath@kbin.social 1 year ago
It's a scripting language.
A solid, verbose, diverse scripting language that gives you impressive control over Windows environments.
If some people are delivering malware or phishing, that sucks, but it doesn't negate the languages merit.
It would be the same as ceasing production of spray paint because of taggers.
The ends don't justify the means.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They have an alternative called Powershell that can do what VBS does and more. Its a modern and actively developed scripting language that Microsoft undoubtedly expect you to port your code into, that is if you cant use a cloud product first wink wink
It will be a shit show of course, at least for those orgs that dont block this depreciation outright via whatever method comes out. Still, there is putty to patch the holes.
kubica@kbin.social 1 year ago
The things done in excel might not be critical per-se, but macros are used and abused a lot and many companies can be affected by their dependence on workflows refined over the years.
HidingCat@kbin.social 1 year ago
Haha, don't I know it. I've had to work with some of them in a past life. Messy and also very scary at how they underpin million dollar decisions.
throws_lemy@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
Yup, I was the guy who wrote vba script to calculate performance of network mobile and export the graphical results as ppt files.
Many critcal engineering and finance calculations rely on vba scripts
I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social 1 year ago
I suppose Microsoft Access has better options now you can define the steps in macros, but I think it's still needed for many of the more fiddly bits.
MelodiousFunk@kbin.social 1 year ago
I wrote one of them. It replaced periodically writing down application outputs on paper and sounding the alarm if something went pear-shaped. It wasn't my job to develop software but I didn't want hand cramps to be my job, either. I had vague ideas about how to do what I wanted to do with Excel so I poked at it and googled until it worked. More than a decade later, I'm no longer there but that freakin spreadsheet is still running 24/7, being proudly showed off during tours of the facility.
I will cackle if MS ever pulls the plug on VBA.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 year ago
Your story is pretty typical in my experience. No one hires a dev team to build a VBA tool (except the occasional MS Access tool). It’s normally someone doing the work who works out how to do a basic macro to make it quicker, and it grows from there.
MelodiousFunk@kbin.social 1 year ago
Indeed. In my case, I fought through managerial malaise and turned the entire process on its ear. But even after the approach proved its worth, they refused to put a dev resource on it.
Remember kids, being good at something means it's now your job. If the boss refuses to compensate you for it, slap it on your resume and find someone who will.
Pistcow@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Until it’s a cornerstone of the corporation…
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 1 year ago
MS: You have until (now +2 years) to phase out VBA.
Enterprise: panic!
Diplomjodler@feddit.de 1 year ago
Nah. They’ll just sit in their hands for two years and then panic.
pirrrrrrrr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
And then MS will issue a limited extension.
An business still won’t be ready.
Modern auth on email is still causing problems for a lot of places.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 1 year ago
I’ve worked for a major group and I was for a while the only maintainer of a shitty request form in an excel file, sent worldwide to hundreds of people. As they wanted more and more specific functions the stuff grew to thousands of unholy VBA code lines and a huge hidden sheet of data.
That thing even had a fully custom language switch function for all dozens of field labels and their possible values.
I kinda hope they’re still using it (that wouldn’t surprise me) and that their whole workflow will crash and burn when Microsoft finally kills VBA.
aev@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Enterprise will cause a boom in hiring VBA devs to migrate legacy apps to other programming languages, then hear Microsoft will extend support for a few more years, then fire all those VBA devs again. If Microsoft had some wits, they’d create easy tools to migrate VBA to C#.
eee@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Well it’s gotta be done some time… otherwise we end up with another version of COBOL.
Dee@lemmings.world 1 year ago
We’re already there, I don’t see VBA being phased out of accounting or finance for at least a decade and I’m not even sure then.
Melkath@kbin.social 1 year ago
Or how about this... we use what works and stop throwing the world into chaos every 4 years so Microsoft can sell their next 50k/year enterprise application.