PApanic·Mar 18, 2021Submission
6502 SpASM (6502 Spreadsheet Assembler and Linker)
102 points · Open discussiontilleul
apple2
BASIC2021–2021
tilleul / apple2
apple2
Apple ][ stuff
3Distinct people
3Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
145GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Apple ][ stuff
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
This is the part which saves crazy time: The loving part of VBA is its interoperability across the Office suite, but there's no reason why that couldn't be done in, say, Python…
ddingus used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by week3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-02-10 02:30:40 UTC to 2021-03-18 21:18:31 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 8 | 2021-02-08 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-15 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Feb 15 | 2021-02-15 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-22 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 22 | 2021-02-22 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 1 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-08 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 8 | 2021-03-08 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-15 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 15 | 2021-03-15 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-22 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesThis is the part which saves crazy time:
The loving part of VBA is its interoperability across the Office suite, but there's no reason why that couldn't be done in, say, Python
I agree with you, but Python and pretty much every code environment is missing a few things that create a pretty high barrier to entry:
For a whole lot of cases, VBA is not even needed. People put data into cells, operate on it with formulas in other cells that drop output into still other cells which are then used to get output.
Input can be almost anything these days.
Formulas have a well defined, easy to understand syntax that work across a wide variety of operators. Simple copy / paste operations make sense, often with the intended data mapped right in. (given people are a little organized)
Output can be almost anything these days too.
And it's live. Make a
Read the rest
change, see it happen.
That's real power! People don't have to know much to make it all work either.
I have been using Excel to transform business data for years, model business and a lot of other things, and as a rapid prototype system. I can write code too. Often I do, but the more specific and or variable the task is, like a one off need to solve yesterday, the more attractive just banging it out in Excel becomes.
Should one get super crazy, have one of those outputs from Excel be a working program. No joke. A script file is one of my favorite outputs. Mash the data up in Excel, and once the plan of attack is clear, execute the script and watch it run on the real system.
Check this thing out:
https://github.com/tilleul/apple2/tree/master/tools/6502_ass...
It's a perfectly usable, and I would suggest one of the easiest, assemblers I've ever seen! I ran it on my mobile. Crazy.
I just used it to knock out a little routine for a retro-game project I'm working on and was kind of stunned at how lean, accessible, functional this really is.
For Clarity: Replacing VBA with something else costs more than the value add at present, and it's because Excel is the gateway drug into VBA. By the time people reach for VBA, they already are familiar with a lot of it.
6502 SpASM (6502 Spreadsheet Assembler)
3 points · Open discussion