18th Dec.' 17 - Headlines

Soon developers could use their favorite programming language inside Excel!

Microsoft considers adding Python as an official Scripting Language to Excel

Microsoft is considering adding Python as one of the official Excel scripting languages, according to a topic on Excel's feedback hub opened last month.

Since it was opened, the topic has become the most voted feature request, double the votes of the second-ranked proposition. "Let us do scripting with Python! Yay! Not only as an alternative to VBA, but also as an alternative to field functions (=SUM(A1:A2))," the feature request reads, as opened by one of Microsoft's users. In response to the buzz, Microsoft put up a survey to gather more information and know how users would like to use Python inside Excel. If approved, Excel users would be able to use Python scripts to interact with Excel documents, their data, and some of Excel's core functions, similar to how Excel currently supports VBA scripts.

Generating type annotations from sampled production types

Let your code type-hint itself: introducing open source MonkeyType

Instagram Engineering has announced that it is open sourcing MonkeyType, its tool for automatically adding type annotations to a Python 3 code via runtime tracing of types seen. “Our first forays into manually adding type annotations were discouraging. It can take hours to annotate a single module, sometimes painstakingly tracing through multiple layers of function calls and objects to understand the possible types at some call site. So we built MonkeyType,” the team said. “Instead of guessing or spelunking for the right types, let your test suite or (better!) your production system tell you what the real types are.”

MonkeyType collects runtime types of function arguments and return values, and can automatically generate stub files or even add draft type annotations directly to your Python code based on the types collected at runtime.

MonkeyType requires Python 3.6+ and the retype library (for applying type stubs to code files). It generates only Python 3 type annotations (no type comments). To install MonkeyType with pip: pip install MonkeyType. For more details, read the full documentation.

This library will help you easily apply deep learning on molecular structures

Announcing Chainer Chemistry: A library for Deep Learning in Biology and Chemistry

Chainer Chemistry is a collection of tools to train and run neural networks for tasks in biology and chemistry using Chainer. It supports various state-of-the-art deep learning neural network models (especially Graph Convolution Neural Network) for chemical molecule property prediction. The library was developed during the PFN 2017 summer internship, and part of the library has been implemented by an internship student, Hirotaka Akita at Kyoto University. For more information, you can refer to documentation. You can install this library via PyPI: pip install chainer-chemistry