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Is it still something you can code with your mouse? I remember having to deal with it on my first job because the team knew nothing about coding. They had “rec
by bertil 3y ago
Is it still something you can code with your mouse?
I remember having to deal with it on my first job because the team knew nothing about coding. They had “recorded” macros by clicking around and never seeing a line of code. It was incredibly brittle: any change to the table, even adding a comment, would break it, but it allowed them to automate a task.
- layer8 3y agoYou can still record VBA macros in MS Office.
- sumtechguy 3y agoThis sort of programming is very powerful. It lets people who have no idea what big O is or how to make a fully automated CI/CD system with testing and all of the bells and whistles just get something done. Just to make a dialog and automate something. That type of programing is very powerful. Many times a huge mess to clean up but very powerful and gets things done. We sometimes lose sight of that. Computers are to get things done. Getting rid of the moat we have build could be very powerful.
- jimbokun 3y agoYes. In an ideal world this is how first draft of software would be done. And professional software engineers only come in when it's time to make it secure, fast, less brittle, scalable, available to more users, etc. Like finding the screen that takes forever to load because there's a hidden O(n^2) in there and replacing it with an O(n log n), etc.
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt’s also the ultimate discoverability tool. People struggle with not knowing how to describe a task they can do but not with code. The record gets you very close very quickly. If you’re fluent in adjusting selection logic you’re usually going to have it pretty easy.
- mrweasel 3y agoWe used some weird testing tool from HP I think. It could record you clicking around in an application and generate a VBScript. You could then go in a modify the generated code, add parameters and fix the brittleness. It meant that you could get a ton of coding done in a very short about of time.
- rchaud 3y agoMacros recording a series of mouse clicks: That's what I did when I was a finance intern many moons ago. Knew nothing about programming at the time.