Thanks, Stefan, it's good to know this already exists! Seeing it mentioned side-by-side with an Bloomberg API indicates that this feature request probably came from the financial industry.
-Zhong On Tuesday, August 2, 2016 at 11:50:51 PM UTC-5, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > Julia Computing offers a product (JuliaInXL) which does exactly this. > > On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 11:07 PM, Zhong Pan <[email protected] <javascript:> > > 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 >>>> >>>> >
