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That was me. I wrote what I affectionately call "crapware," which are small apps that solve a problem but are not intended for use at scale. There was a lot of
by analog31 3y ago
That was me. I wrote what I affectionately call "crapware," which are small apps that solve a problem but are not intended for use at scale. There was a lot of this stuff, such as little database queries, or hacking together a few industrial sensors with a crude display. Businesses ran on crapware. Maybe they still do. A few thousand lines of code that I wrote for a manufacturing fixture ran bug-free for more than a decade.
I remember that just downloading and installing VB.NET was burdensome, especially in the plant where many of the computers were not networked.
When VB.NET came out, programmers hung on to their VB6 disks, and kept using it for easily another decade. By the time VB6 really reached the end of the road, its replacements (e.g., Python for me) were up to speed, and free.
- jacquesm 3y agoI came across such a project recently built using FileMaker in 2001 or so. On the original hardware, no less.
- ta1243 3y agoI've written a lot of crapware, still keeps my employer working 15+ years on. Meanwhile "replacement" systems have come and gone, but the users still keep using the crapware. 1) See a business problem 2) Put something together to solve the problem 3) Move On
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI was going to say, a few thousands lines of code that reliably solves a real business problem for over a decade is pretty much the exact opposite of 'crapware'...
- emodendroket 3y agoAs long as you don’t care about stuff like maintainability or logging sure. The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever and then it’s a huge headache to untangle the reliance on it and go more robust. Of course if that never happens it’s great and frees up developers’ time for higher-value work.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI don't get the relation here?, most businesses care somewhat, and certainly the better run businesses do quite a bit, so they'll make sure to record down everything important about the software.
- emodendroket 3y agoSo when it goes wrong in many predictable ways it’s a nightmare. All the stuff software engineers put around software to make it reliable, fault tolerant, and generally having the expected behavior is not just for laughs but the result of hard-won experience.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWhy would it be a 'nightmare' if they recorded everything down and understand their software, what it does, what it doesn't do, how it operates, etc.?
- emodendroket 3y agoDatabase corruption, unexpected bugs, inability to account for new desired behaviors… have you worked on software before?
- sn_master 3y agoAlso, most machines did not have the .Net framework installed, and back then it was 20 MB download which was gonna take ~2 hours on dial up back in the day vs MSVMVM6.dll which was on all Windows versions from 98 until 7 at least.
- deaddodo 3y ago> When VB.NET came out, programmers hung on to their VB6 disks, and kept using it for easily another decade. By the time VB6 really reached the end of the road, its replacements (e.g., Python for me) were up to speed, and free. VS6 was still the majority IDE well into the mid-00s, at least in an academic setting. I still remember getting handed an academic license DVD to use for my C++ courses in University around that time. The disconnect between "classic" and ".NET" VS took a long time to break, I would say until about VS2008/2010.
- nextaccountic 3y agowhat you called crapware is just scripting, but with a gui rather than running in terminal it's like a quick and dirty shell script or what once could be a tcl or perl script, but today would most probably be a python script