It's just too much effort for nothing. People using VBA for automation pretty much live in the ecosystem of MS Office so it's not a big win for them. Plus MS has to spend huge sum of money to incorporate C# into Office.

And we already have VSTO.

Yeah, and considering that the .NET 5 runtime will run in WebAssembly this is quite interesting. Maybe they are porting VBA libs to .NET. Then C# and VB.NET can pick up.

Or they do the real deal: Port VBA to .NET ... that however, would be a little bit difficult to explain with VB.NET in place as well ;)

Very surprised after all these years (decades?) they have not done something like this. Basic has been a low priority at MS for a long time now.

It could have made for an interesting alternative to PowerShell as well.

Not a PS1 expert by any means but you have to spend some time with it to appreciate the design decisions. It's a very "wholesomely" designed language.

Try eg. The for each parallel construct which made me realize why the output in PS1 behaves how it does.

That's always been the problem for me, I don't use it often enough to become fluent with it.

You're missing out. As a full time Linux user (since a year), PowerShell is by far the best shell out there (once it starts after 5 secs)

I'm not going to start using it for the sake of it. Some tools I just dip in and out of when I need to. Build software is the same, I haven't modified my build scripts for a year.