Snort. Yeah, so, back in the late 90s, I met the CTO for ICL (later acquired by Fujitsu, but it was basically what was then left of the 'British IBM'), after ev

Snort. Yeah, so, back in the late 90s, I met the CTO for ICL (later acquired by Fujitsu, but it was basically what was then left of the 'British IBM'), after evaluating their Visual Basic 5-based front-end software for a day or two, at the instigation of Microsoft UK. VB5 was not an entirely horrific choice for an UI running on Windows touchscreen hardware at the time, but the project was riddled with basic mistakes, like blocking foreground threads with long-running background operations, and, mostly, threading model mismatches between UI and back-end code (which was all C++, but not the good kind -- and oh, it implemented some weird distributed messaging bus, where you could do just about anything, but nothing really worked, especially not if the ISDN-based network was acting up...). My recommendation was to upgrade to VB6, which made multi-threaded foreign function calls at least reliable-ish, to re-do the entire calling surface of the C++ libraries accordingly, plus to significantly improve documentation, since literally nobody seemed to know which calls did exactly what (as in: which parameters they required and what they returned) and how to handle retries. The guy literally listened to me for 30 seconds (possibly less!), then turned around, and told his minions to escort me out and "get someone who understands what we're doing here". Well...