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Excel already has versioned file formats with significantly different affordances, and hasn't appeared to have all sorts of compatibility headaches as a result.



Integrating a whole separate language ecosystem is one or two orders of magnitude more complex though. It’s more like HTML5/WHATWG suddenly adding Python as a first-class scripting language besides JavaScript, and web browsers having to integrate that.


Isn't this what people are trying to do with pyscript? Although in that case it uses WASM?


It’s different because WASM is much more strictly defined and has a more limited scope than Python. Thanks to WASM, browsers don’t have be able to understand Python/PyScript. The trade-off is that you can’t, for example, view/edit the Python code in the browser’s devtools.

A WASM-like approach wouldn’t work very well for Excel, because you’re supposed to be able to edit the source code/formulas within the Excel application.




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