So I gave a dev a choice yesterday
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Please don't, it's just easier *eyes begin to water and voice cracks*... it's just easier not to talk about it. *runs off sobbing*
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While it is part of your job description (accountant/finance) these guys are corporate developers in a finance department, excel spit is one of our main data sources X|
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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*grin* I did that, too, but I preferred Applesoft BASIC. Either way, my point was not that BASIC or VBA is useless, only that it's wrong to assume that b/c you use something a lot, every developer has used it.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Christian Graus wrote:
it's wrong to assume that b/c you use something a lot, every developer has used it.
Now that is true, however I do note that most have been exposed to some flavour of VB.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Christian Graus wrote:
it's wrong to assume that b/c you use something a lot, every developer has used it.
Now that is true, however I do note that most have been exposed to some flavour of VB.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
VB -- the cold virus of developer skills.
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VB -- the cold virus of developer skills.
AspDotNetDev wrote:
the cold virus
Precisely, everybody gets exposed at some time!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Christian Graus wrote:
it's wrong to assume that b/c you use something a lot, every developer has used it.
Now that is true, however I do note that most have been exposed to some flavour of VB.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
True, in my case it was a single incident in 10 years tho.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
The folks in my group would have jumped on the VBA project. The sissies hate writing and generally refuse to do it. I write practically all of the documentation for the group.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Major disconnect. Would you ask your proctologist to clean your teeth? They're probably both looking at job sites as I write this ...
Rene Pilon wrote:
They're probably both looking at job sites as I write this ...
Hmmm one of them is not in this morning - suspicious... If you think as a developer you will not be required to write doco then you will be sadly disappointed. In most (all) corporate shops there is no such thing as a technical writer, the closest I have seen is where we have hired an agency to to this.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Rene Pilon wrote:
They're probably both looking at job sites as I write this ...
Hmmm one of them is not in this morning - suspicious... If you think as a developer you will not be required to write doco then you will be sadly disappointed. In most (all) corporate shops there is no such thing as a technical writer, the closest I have seen is where we have hired an agency to to this.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Rene Pilon wrote:
They're probably both looking at job sites as I write this ...
Hmmm one of them is not in this morning - suspicious... If you think as a developer you will not be required to write doco then you will be sadly disappointed. In most (all) corporate shops there is no such thing as a technical writer, the closest I have seen is where we have hired an agency to to this.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Mycroft Holmes wrote:
write doco
Sorry? Doco? Documentation? Developers are (mostly) the worst document writers in the known universe.
___________________________________________ .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
_Maxxx_ wrote:
Developers are (mostly) the worst document writers in the known universe.
Indeed. And it's a hard won skill,too.
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them." Eric Hoffer "The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'" John Scalzi
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Mycroft Holmes wrote:
both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net
Same here. What is this VB thing exactly?
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Haha, yes.
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You wouldn't hire me. I wouldn't let you. I've actually programmed about 2000 lines of it but I disavow any knowledge of it (except for here of course). ;P I know about 100 programming languages and vba is one I'm happy to put behind me.
Aside from all the arguments about the faults with VBA, I really don't understand the antipathy towards it (other than from a language design POV). At the end of the day (and I don't want to rekindle the religious language wars here!) a programming language (however good or bad) is a tool - you can do a good (or bad) job with it regardless of its nature. For lots of scenarios, using the built-in (ie VBA) when producing something for a client in Access or Excel makes much more sense than developing a full-on, multi-user, mathematically proven system based around MS SQL on Server 2008 using C#/LINQ etc, especially when all they wanted was automated production of a report based on a few figures in a spreadsheet. As my father used to say: "A bad workman always blames his tools..." 8) There's far too much "over-engineering" in the software development world, it seems to me...
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
The closest I ever came to VB/VBA/.NET were my (partially successful) attempts at integrating Excel table views in an application using OLE2, some 15 years ago. It was a nightmare, as all variables were declared 'Variant'. and there was no explanation at all anywhere in the documentation that told me what actual types were expected, what each parameter meant, and in what order they were supposed to be passed. There weren't even parameter names in the documentation that you could base an educated guess on, it was just trial and error! Note that I was using both the official documentation (i. e. the Excel help files) and a pair of very insightful 'behind the scenes' books about OLE2, but as I said, there were no parameter level explanations to be found anywhere at the time! Not to mention that quite a few functions weren't defined as described in the documentation, were varying dependend on the actual OS version, or delivered different results. Based on that experience you can imagine I avoided any successor of that abomination like the plague, be it COM, VBA, or .NET. (and sorry: anything that got 'Basic' in its name isn't considered a programming language by me) I realize that the documentation and the stability of the interface got to have improved in the meantime, but I still nourish a strong loathing for anything in that direction. Thankfully I was never required to touch any of this again, not even with a hot poker. So no, I do not have any knowledge of VB(A)/.NET either. I've programmed in C++ when compiling still required two steps and templates weren't fully supported, long before the time of OLE and it's successors, and I'm still programming in C++ today, knowing that most of today's C++ programs could be compiled with compilers written 20 years ago. Call me conservative if you want to, but I don't like proprietary, platform dependend languages that change every time time the OS or Office version changes.
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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We had a requirement that needed someone to write some VBA macros in Excel (2003) yesterday, both devs on the team denied any knowledge of VB/VBA/VB.Net I gave them a choice of doing the job in VBA or documentation, we should have some great manuals for this project. I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming, I thought we all got dipped in that stuff at some time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Mycroft Holmes wrote:
I was astonished that a person who calls himself a developer has no knowledge of office or macro programming
I worked on a team where only one member (me) out of six knew anything about VBA.
I must get a clever new signature for 2011.