4 ms·
Joel played a part in creating VBA for Excel (and likely the other Office clients) when he was a program manager at Microsoft in the early 90s (see http://www.j
by vba 10y ago
Joel played a part in creating VBA for Excel (and likely the other Office clients) when he was a program manager at Microsoft in the early 90s (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html).
I'm a developer on XL (at Microsoft), only half way through the video and have learnt a thing or two. Out of academic curiosity I sometimes ask old-timers if they ever worked with Joel. So far nobody recognizes his name, though there is next to none left in Excel who were XL in early 90s or before.
- yuhong 10y agoAs a side note, current versions of Excel still opens and even can save Excel 5.0 files by default but no longer ships with VBACV10.DLL that converts the VBA code. It was easy to find bugs in this code when I was fuzzing using HxD years ago.
- harry8 10y agoI'm sorry, you're probably a nice person, kind to animals and children but still I kind of, well... Excel, just say NO. Friends don't let friends use excel. Ever. Microsoft has no interest in fixing the bugs, the bugs are extremely costly. People regularly misallocate resources based on excel bugs. These screw ups happen at vast scale with hugs sums of money and worse. Here's a couple of links I didn't read closely. Any web search will find so very many it's silly. http://andrewgelman.com/2013/04/17/excel-bashing/ http://andrewgelman.com/2013/04/17/excel-bashing/ https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelStatProbs.pdf https://oit.utk.edu/research/documentation/Documents/ExcelSt... Gnumeric is better than excel.
- harry8 10y ago"Microsoft has lots of top researchers so it’s hard for me to understand how Excel can remain so crappy." --Andrew Gelman It really is a real problem.
- mistermann 10y agoPeople working on Excel at Microsoft don't even know of him, like never heard of his name before? That can't be possible can it?
- vba 10y agoI think I semi-subconsciously left that ambiguous on purpose. A fair amount of people have certainly heard of him, but when I asked a couple of old-timers in the recent past they didn't seem to recognise the name.
- flukus 10y agoDoes MS not follow that old habit of C developers to put stuff like last edited by and lust updated in the comments? You'd think his name would be everywhere on the internals.
- vba 10y agoThey did have the code owners' name in nice formatted comments but they don't do that anymore, at least not in the Excel codebase. There are plenty of artifacts with the code owners names left behind (many having since moved on from Excel and Microsoft). Mr Spolsky was a program manager, so I doubt he wrote much if any code that made it into the Excel binaries, but I'm interested to know if he did.
- Intermernet 10y agoHis name doesn't appear in either the Excel 97 flight simulator monolith credits, or the Excel 2000 "dev hunter" driving game, so he may have joined the Excel team after that, or they may not have been exhaustive lists. They're still very cool ways to put developer credits into enterprise software :-)
- TorKlingberg 10y agoVersion control systems are better these days, so you don't need to. Even us C programmers have stopped putting names, dates, revisions numbers and other gunk in the comments.