Best software for PCB design ever

[Simon]

I used to know I guy who used Microsoft Word for layout - we called it word-cad. He was the only adopter.

Microsoft Word -let that sink in. Absolutely terrifying.

Microsoft Word is causes considerable frustration even when used for its intended purpose of word processing.

MS Word is cause for frustration when used for any purpose. I thought I would switch from LO writer to MS word for my course work as I should be fluent in what is sadly the industry standard. Despite following the instructions for the math input copying their example it still failed to work, back to LO writer it is.

[Chris42]

I think that the problem with VBA is that it is still taught in schools.
It is one of the worst programming languages currently in use and yet people still write new code in it because they don't know any better. Nowadays we have much better languages that are simpler to learn than VBA.
Those languages have IDEs that don't yell at you if you make a typo, rich ecosystems, consistent syntax, detailed documentation. Just to name some improvements.
Also in VBA you still need to learn how to write simple programs so why not write them in some language that does not have 3 ways of defining variables, functions that are broken in some obscure way depending on the version of excel and other unexpected behaviour.

Personally for tasks like pulling data out of some instrument I use Python.
It took me 1h and 60 lines of code to write a program that connects to LRC meter, configures it, records data and displays them on a plot. In VBA that would be 10h of doing some weird hacks just to establish a connection, nevermind parse a message.

[Mr. Scram]

Pretty poor design from Microsoft, that Excel lets you enter more rows than it can save...  it should have put a stop to that with an error message...

That said, the actual file size limit of an Excel spreadsheet is 2 GB?

...and Excel supports Autosave every 10 mins or whatever?

Who says there wasn't an error message? Someone has to read it for it to be useful. Part of the issue seems to have been a lack of error checking. It's a surprisingly common issue.

[Simon]

Pretty poor design from Microsoft, that Excel lets you enter more rows than it can save...  it should have put a stop to that with an error message...

That said, the actual file size limit of an Excel spreadsheet is 2 GB?

...and Excel supports Autosave every 10 mins or whatever?

Who says there wasn't an error message? Someone has to read it for it to be useful. Part of the issue seems to have been a lack of error checking. It's a surprisingly common issue.

I think the problem is that they were not manually entering the data. Apparently one reason to use the old file format is that it supports scripting. I don't know enough about excel (ask Matt Parker) to say anything for sure but I suspect that they were not really using excel but the file format.

[Berni]

I think that the problem with VBA is that it is still taught in schools.
It is one of the worst programming languages currently in use and yet people still write new code in it because they don't know any better. Nowadays we have much better languages that are simpler to learn than VBA.
Those languages have IDEs that don't yell at you if you make a typo, rich ecosystems, consistent syntax, detailed documentation. Just to name some improvements.
Also in VBA you still need to learn how to write simple programs so why not write them in some language that does not have 3 ways of defining variables, functions that are broken in some obscure way depending on the version of excel and other unexpected behaviour.

Personally for tasks like pulling data out of some instrument I use Python.
It took me 1h and 60 lines of code to write a program that connects to LRC meter, configures it, records data and displays them on a plot. In VBA that would be 10h of doing some weird hacks just to establish a connection, nevermind parse a message.

There are still plenty of worse languages than VB. Most of the issue in VB is that it drags on a lot of legacy crap. But it is a pretty simple easy to learn language that doesn't make it too easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Interfacing to SCPI instruments is no hack at all, just a regular machine code DLL import of the IVI library like all other languages.

Python also has quite a few things that will make some programmers raise pitchforks against it (like just declaring things on the fly, adding members to objects on the fly, lack of firm data types, the way mutable and imutable things behave very differently, its classically interpreted making it about as fast as molasses, the way libraries are installed and loaded, using invisible whitespace to group statements etc..). Its just another scripting language that can be as powerful as you want it to be. Tho in my opinion it is better suited for quickly throwing things together simply because you can quickly pip install a library to do pretty much every possible thing under the sun. Hence it is my goto way of quickly automating something.

What sucks is the Excel API that you are forced to use in order to do anything useful in interaction with Excel. Just like Excel itself it is a huge legacy clusterfuck that does things in the most non logical of ways. Even if you had a python flavor of VBA you would still get hit in the face by this horrible API.

Excel is actually a pretty good tool for playing around with small data sets, but i would never pay sticker price for MS Office due to the overall bad quality of the software.