On 23/02/2013 10:07 PM, Francois Labreque wrote:
> To Andy's point of it not catching on, The authors make it quite clear
> in the abstract that they don't like the idea of a full-fledged
> programming language being bolted-on to Excel. I guess they got shot
> down when the Powers-That-Be(tm) decided that VBA would be the way to go.

Reading the conclusion, it appears they never actually wrote the running 
code. They had a PowerPoint mockup, a demo written in Flash, and so on. 
But they never actually implemented a real Excel extension that really 
did work.

Also, the report makes quite clear that VBA already exists today. The 
problem is, the number of people who understand spreadsheets vastly 
outnumbers the number of people who can work something as abstract as 
VBA (or any other purely text-based language). Hence the motivation for 
this paper.

I guess MS figured there was no market for it. Which is not an 
unreasonable conclusion...

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