fzumstein (u/fzumstein)

fzumstein commented on Please just try HTMX pleasejusttryhtmx.com/... · Posted by u/iNic

I worked on a large commercial AlpineJS app and grew to really, really hate it. It's great for smallish projects where the limits of the tool are known, but it is in no way a drop-in replacement for something like React (and I am no fan of React). People like to throw around how easy it is to do basic things, but building a real app using Alpine is an absolute nightmare.

Alpine data objects can grow to be quite large, so you wind up inlining hundreds of lines of JS as strings within your HTML template, which often limits your editor's ability to do JS checks without additional config.

State management in Alpine is implicit and nested and not a serious solution for building commercial apps IMO.

And don't even get me started on unsafe-eval.

If it's your hobby app and you are the developer and the product owner, go for Alpine. If you're working at a company that is asking you to build a competitive web product in 2025, use a more robust tool. Hotwire and Stimulus has scaled much better from an organization standpoint in my experience.

fzumstein · 6 days ago

Have you tried the CSP build of AlpineJS? It takes the code out of the template into a proper JS file, no unsafe-eval. Isn't state management mostly handled on the backend when you use AlpineJS?

fzumstein commented on Xlwings Lite – Python in Excel Using Pyodide lite.xlwings.org/... · Posted by u/owenm

bormaj · 9 months ago

This is a really exciting development. Can anyone currently using this chime in on working with pyodide/dependency management in this setting?

I imagine that this reduces the iteration time for developing excel integrations. It's unfortunate that direct db queries aren't supported, but I guess that's a wasm/pyodide issue.

fzumstein · 9 months ago

I am not a random user, but the creator. The dependencies are managed via standard requirements.txt file, which is stored in the Excel workbook itself. When you open xlwings Lite with the workbook, the dependencies are installed from either PyPI or Pyodide's own repository (after the first download from the browser's cache).

Direct db queries are indeed a restriction of Wasm/Pyodide, but there are more and more databases offering a HTTP layer. For example, Supabase has this built-in via PostgREST. For Oracle, there is Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS). Ultimately, you can also build your own little proxy server, although that's a little bit more work, but might still be worth it for company-internal use.

fzumstein commented on Xlwings Lite – Python in Excel Using Pyodide lite.xlwings.org/... · Posted by u/owenm

nsonha · 9 months ago

Does it work with any opensource Excel alternative?

fzumstein · 9 months ago

No, this is for Excel only, but it does work with the free online version of Excel. I think LibreOffice has support for Python via PyOO.

fzumstein commented on SQLookup sqlookup.com/... · Posted by u/fzumstein

fzumstein · a year ago

SQLookup is an Excel add-in that gives you access to the SQLOOKUP function. The SQLOOKUP function allows you to query data in your Excel workbook using SQL (SQLite dialect). The add-in is free and works with Excel on Windows, macOS, and web. It can be installed via the add-in store.

fzumstein commented on GitHub Copilot is now available for free github.com/features/copil... · Posted by u/ksec

kwantaz · a year ago

Includes up to 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests per month.

fzumstein · a year ago

So basically it’s free for 1 day per month (I only use chat).

fzumstein commented on Python in Excel – Available Now techcommunity.microsoft.c... · Posted by u/masteruvpuppetz

ryzvonusef · a year ago

from what I understand from seeing youtube videos of it in action, you can use python functions libraries for the calculation part, but one of the strenghts of VBA was that you could interact with the Excel software itself, and that bit hasn't been replicated in python.

people liked they could set up scripts in VBA for automating routine tasks, but hated the VBA language syntax, from what I've understood, and wished they could program those functions in some more popular language like Python etc. But that isn't what this is.

fzumstein · a year ago

It's exactly why I built xlwings, to replace VBA with Python. Python in Excel instead is a competitor to the Excel formula language.

fzumstein commented on My thoughts on Python in Excel xlwings.org/blog/my-thoug... · Posted by u/fzumstein

breckognize · 2 years ago

My apologies, that came off harsher than I intended. I've used xlwings in previous jobs to complete Excel automation tasks, so thank you for building it. xlwings is one of the projects that motivated me to start Row Zero. My main issue with it, and other Excel add-ins, is they break the promise of an .xlsx file as a self-contained virtual machine of code and data. I can no longer just send the .xlsx file - I need the recipient to install (e.g.) Python first. This makes collaboration a nightmare.

I wanted a spreadsheet interface, which my business partners need, but with a way for power users (me) to do more complicated stuff in Python instead of VBA.

To borrow your phrasing, our thesis is that it has to be Excel-compatible spreadsheet + something, not necessarily Excel + something. It's early days for us, but we've seen a couple publicly traded companies switch off Excel to Row Zero to eliminate the security risks that come with Excel's desktop model.

fzumstein · 2 years ago

No offense taken, and happy that xlwings was an inspiration for creating Row Zero! I don't really buy the security issues though for being the reason for switching from Excel to Row Zero. Yes, Excel has security issues, but so does the cloud, but at least the issues with Excel can be dealt with: disable VBA macros on a company level, run Excel on airgapped computers, etc. Promising that your cloud won't be hacked or is unintentionally leaking information is impossible, no matter how much auditing and certification you're going through. The relatively recent addition of xlwings Server fixes pretty much all of the issues you encountered in your previous company: user don't need a local installation of Python, but the Office admin just pushes an Office.js add-in to them and their done. No sensitive credentials etc. are required to be stored on the end-users computer or spreadsheet either as you can take advantage of SSO and can manage user roles on Microsoft Entra ID (that companies are using already anyways).

fzumstein commented on My thoughts on Python in Excel xlwings.org/blog/my-thoug... · Posted by u/fzumstein

breckognize · 2 years ago

We built our spreadsheet (https://rowzero.io) from the ground up to integrate natively with Python. Bolting it on like Microsoft did, or as an add in like xlwings, just feels second class. To make it first class, we had to solve three hard problems:

1. Sandboxing and dependencies. Python is extremely unsafe to share, so you need to sandbox execution. There's also the environment/package management problem (does the user you're sharing your workbook with have the same version of pandas as you?). We run workbooks in the cloud to solve both of these.

2. The type system. You need a way to natively interop between Excel's type system and Python's much richer type system. The problem with Excel is there are only two types - numbers and strings. Even dates are just numbers in Excel. Python has rich types like pandas Dataframes, lists, and dictionaries, which Excel can't represent natively. We solved this in a similar way to how Typescript evolved Javascript. We support the Excel formula language and all of its types and also added support for lists, dictionaries, structs, and dataframes.

3. Performance. Our goal was to build a spreadsheet 1000x faster than Excel. Early on we used Python as our formula language but were constantly fighting the GIL and slow interpreter performance. Instead we implemented the spreadsheet engine in Rust as a columnar engine and seamlessly marshal Python types to the spreadsheet type system and back.

It's the hardest systems problem our team's ever worked on. Previously we wrote the S3 file system, so it's not like this was our first rodeo. There's just a ton of details you need to get right to make it feel seamless.

You can try it free here: https://rowzero.io/new?feature=code

fzumstein · 2 years ago

As the author of said second class add-in, let me just guess that your most popular feature request was adding the "Import from xlsx" functionality...which describes the whole issue: it's always Excel + something, never something instead of Excel.