Julia Computing offers a product (JuliaInXL) which does exactly this. On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 11:07 PM, Zhong Pan <[email protected]> wrote:
> Eric, hustf, > > I think making Julia attractive to Excel/VBA users will be quite valuable. > Excel still rules in business world for simple to moderately complex data > analysis. Strangely, even engineers love it - there is still a large group > of hardware/mechanical engineers who are not productive in a general > purpose programming language, but they love Excel for its simplicity, > programmability, and visual appeal (who doesn't like cells with dizzying > colors and fancy fonts :-)). And I know some engineers who can program > really well actually wrote quite sophisticated VBA macros inside Excel so > the resulted sheet can be used intuitively by a non-programmer (e.g. a > manufacturing staff or a field support) while saving the trouble of > developing an independent GUI which will take an extra head count. > > While Julia will certainly win the speed contest, I don't think Julia > should or could replace Excel/VBA. Maybe a more practical and gentle > approach is to make Julia conveniently available from inside Excel/VBA, > similar to what RExcel <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RExcel> does? When > the complexity or computational load run out of VBA's capability, the > Exceler can trust Julia to get the job done, fast. > > -Zhong > > > On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 1:14:37 AM UTC-5, Eric Forgy wrote: >> >> I mentioned to Prof. Edelman (only half jokingly) at an event in >> Singapore, that we should add Excel/VBA to the list of benchmarks. >> >> If I'm in a corporate setting and trying to sell Julia for some internal >> project, the person making the call has probably never heard of any of the >> languages in the Julia benchmark, but they have heard of Excel/VBA, so, as >> silly as it may seem, I actually think it could go a long way for Julia >> evangelists to see more comparisons to Excel/VBA. >> >> On Monday, August 1, 2016 at 1:45:24 AM UTC+8, hustf wrote: >>> >>> It is nice to have a little check on speed from time to time. I still >>> use VBA for easy cooperation with less programming savvy colleguaes. >>> >>> Julia 1.17s. >>> VBA (excel alt + f11): 12 s. >>> >>> This is a bit unfair to neolithic man Joel Spolsky since no optimization >>> was performed: >>> >>> Sub benchmark() >>> nsamples = 1000000 >>> Dim y() As Double >>> ReDim y(1 To nsamples) >>> x = y >>> For i = 1 To nsamples >>> x(i) = (i - 1) * 5 / (nsamples - 1) >>> Next >>> Debug.Print ("\nBrutal-force loops, 100 times:") >>> sngtime = Timer >>> For m = 1 To 100 >>> For n = 1 To nsamples >>> y(n) = Cos(2 * x(n) + 5) >>> Next >>> Next >>> Debug.Print Timer - sngtime >>> End Sub >>> >>>
