I'd suggest leaving off the

if __name__ == '__main__':

line. That's useful when you have a python file that might be used as either a script or imported into another module. It's pretty clear from the way the rest of the code is structured that this code could only be used as a script.

It's nice to see IronPython get coverage, and the example of accessing the CLR is welcome, but...

Using a global variable ('excel')? Printing from within a function? Surely you can structure your code better than that...

Ugh, horrible code. No thanks.

Ruby's been around longer than Python, btw.

Ruby!=Rails

"Ruby's been around longer than Python, btw."

Not from where I'm sitting - first appearance of Python:1991, first appearance of Ruby: 1995 (I don't have a particular beef with Ruby, other than that it appears to offer no advantage over Python and/or Perl)

Oh yeah, agree with the first AC with regard to the use of global variables. Very sloppy.

Ruby only seems like it's been around longer, since it's so damn slow.

yeah, but it looks like the intention is to show how this stuff works, not to produce production code

about time we had some Python coverage...