> Maintainable, functional applications are constantly thrown out because programmers don't want to use things they consider "dirty". "Eww, I don't want to go a

> Maintainable, functional applications are constantly thrown out because programmers don't want to use things they consider "dirty". "Eww, I don't want to go anywhere near that. It's (procedural|PHP|got 'goto' statements|VBA|not the cool thing that everyone's talking about)." Personally, I really, really don't like Visual Basic. I don't even claim to have anything resembling a rational reason for this attitude. It's deeply ingrained prejudice. And if I have a reasonable alternative to touching VB code, I'll take it gladly. But I've had to touch a few VBA/Excel based "applications" over the last year or two, and I did it. It was no fun at all, but it was still better than rebuilding those things from scratch. In one case, we replaced an Excel sheet crawling with VBA by a PivotTable which does the same job, is more maintainable, the file is a lot smaller and it appears to run slightly faster. There is also a part of me that loves picking up some old code written by somebody who has long since left the company, possibly to solve a problem I do not fully comprehend, and fix some obscure bug or add some minor feature. So far, I'll admit I was quite lucky in that those programs I had to touch were reasonably well written, or at least readable and structured in a sanity-preserving way. But still, it's fun, in a way, and the "dirtier", the funnier; at least as long I have a clearly defined task and get to walk away from it when I'm done. Using the hot new toy that all the cool kinds are using is probably fun, too. But working on a 10-20 year old application that only a handful of people have ever touched, has an appeal that outweighs the distinct lack of sex appeal. Plus, you get to tell some interesting stories about the things you've seen. =)