4 ms·

Exactly! The little Visual Basic I saw was always and entangled, manually tested, spaghetti code mess. Devs were productive only at the start of the project and

Exactly! The little Visual Basic I saw was always and entangled, manually tested, spaghetti code mess. Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex.

JohnBooty 3y ago
Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex. ...and as your productivity declined, your manager thought you were a dolt or perhaps had some kind of drug problem that was interfering with your work. Because he saw how easy productivity was at the start ("look! you just draw a button with your mouse!") and couldn't understand why it quickly became a nightmare.
Tao3300 3y ago
My favorite VB6 moment was as an intern. I opened a project that lived on a shared drive that wasn't in source control. Visual Studio popped up a dialog warning that I didn't have the proper license on my PC for the parts of the app that interfaced with Excel. Then it cheerfully deleted the offending project files and sections of code and saved it. On the shared drive.
- JackMorgan 3y ago
  Big oof right there. Thankfully, I've never had that happen on the job. The lack of meaningful version control in most VB projects is dangerous. It's like trying to operate a chainsaw without a handle. Whenever I get a new VB project to rewrite I always have to stop and remember "don't touch _anything!_". Then I sneak around like Indiana Jones in a lost temple filled with traps.
JackMorgan 3y ago
I make a good living turning VB+Access messes into something modern and stable. After a point it's such a huge mess that it's either rewrite or leave it untouched forever. Sometimes it's important enough to pay someone to untangle the whole snarl of cables and turn it into a modern project that can be handed off to a dev team. Thankfully it's usually pretty straightforward to get all the data out into a modern SQL database and whip up a bunch of CRUD forms in react. The hard part is what to do with all the bad data that is inevitably in the Access database. That often takes the most time, just getting them to clean up all the bad data.

JohnBooty 3y ago

Devs were productive only at the start of the project and slowed down to a crawl as things got more complex. ...and as your productivity declined, your manager thought you were a dolt or perhaps had some kind of drug problem that was interfering with your work. Because he saw how easy productivity was at the start ("look! you just draw a button with your mouse!") and couldn't understand why it quickly became a nightmare.

Tao3300 3y ago

My favorite VB6 moment was as an intern. I opened a project that lived on a shared drive that wasn't in source control. Visual Studio popped up a dialog warning that I didn't have the proper license on my PC for the parts of the app that interfaced with Excel. Then it cheerfully deleted the offending project files and sections of code and saved it. On the shared drive.

JackMorgan 3y ago
Big oof right there. Thankfully, I've never had that happen on the job. The lack of meaningful version control in most VB projects is dangerous. It's like trying to operate a chainsaw without a handle. Whenever I get a new VB project to rewrite I always have to stop and remember "don't touch _anything!_". Then I sneak around like Indiana Jones in a lost temple filled with traps.

JackMorgan 3y ago

I make a good living turning VB+Access messes into something modern and stable. After a point it's such a huge mess that it's either rewrite or leave it untouched forever. Sometimes it's important enough to pay someone to untangle the whole snarl of cables and turn it into a modern project that can be handed off to a dev team. Thankfully it's usually pretty straightforward to get all the data out into a modern SQL database and whip up a bunch of CRUD forms in react. The hard part is what to do with all the bad data that is inevitably in the Access database. That often takes the most time, just getting them to clean up all the bad data.