Good grief
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I'm debugging some legacy VB X| code to figure out why a report is crashing, and encountered this fragment of SQL code:
e.TerminalType *= f.TerminalType:omg: The last time I encountered a left outer join specified in that way was probably 20 years ago. MarcImperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
I never did that myself, even though it seemed to be all the rage. But it's normal for common coding conventions to be superseded by others (most of which are not genuinely better; just different), and for the superseded conventions to be reviled. It's a "The Winner Writes the History Books" thing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:
Microsoft gave the help to port enterprise-scale applications to VB6...
Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:
My boss felt for it
And there's your problem. As professional geeks, it's OUR job to look at a tool/language/framework and see how it should be used. This is how it's supposed to happen: Company X: "This is awesome and can do everything!" Your Boss: "This is awesome and can do everything, and I'm not saying that because they gave me a bribe completely non-conditional gift! Let's use this for everything!" You: "This is a horrible idea, and if we actually use this, we'll probably all end up getting fired/bankrupted" Your Boss: "Oh, ok then. I gotta go. I have a meeting with Company Y."
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)Almost perfect dialog...except the last line... (and 18 years ago a was pretty fresh)
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Ian Shlasko wrote:
It was never meant for ... commercial applications
LOL says who? I've written many a commercial app and website using it, what else were we supposed to use? It's like anything, the second it is superseded all of a sudden people talk like it's rubbish and always was. When .net is superseded people will be slagging it off saying how garbage it was, how assembly binding via configuration and convention was a stupid idea and so on.
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Nah, VB was, for a while, good for a very specific purpose: Writing simple GUI tools and database frontends quickly, without having to worry (much) about destabilizing the rest of the system or leaking out all the RAM with a badly-written MFC app. It was never meant for high-end computing or commercial applications, though I've seen it used for both. Just like Excel... It's an amazing application if you use it as a spreadsheet, or for prototyping. Once you have tons of VBA macros and entire applications written in it, you'll want to shoot yourself. Been there, too.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
Almost perfect dialog...except the last line... (and 18 years ago a was pretty fresh)
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
Oh, the last line was just my way of saying "GOTO start" :)
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
I'm debugging some legacy VB X| code to figure out why a report is crashing, and encountered this fragment of SQL code:
e.TerminalType *= f.TerminalType:omg: The last time I encountered a left outer join specified in that way was probably 20 years ago. MarcImperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
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Ian Shlasko wrote:
It was never meant for ... commercial applications
LOL says who? I've written many a commercial app and website using it, what else were we supposed to use? It's like anything, the second it is superseded all of a sudden people talk like it's rubbish and always was. When .net is superseded people will be slagging it off saying how garbage it was, how assembly binding via configuration and convention was a stupid idea and so on.
F-ES Sitecore wrote:
It's like anything, the second it is superseded all of a sudden people talk like it's rubbish and always was. When .net is superseded people will be slagging it off saying how garbage it was, how assembly binding via configuration and convention was a stupid idea and so on.
Exactly. VB was a perfectly good tool that enabled businesses to get mission critical applications into production sooner than later. I read that a large chunk of VB6 applications are still in production today. [in 1981 I was told that COBOL was dead and it wasn't worth learning. Scary how much COBOL is still in production today, doing what it needs to do.] Were a lot of crap applications written in VB? Absolutely! But a lot of crap applications are now being written now in C#, Java, etc. And yes, the next generation will whine about how crappy C#, Java, etc. were. :sigh: Blaming the software for what people do with it is like blaming the hammer when you miss a nail and put a hole in the dry wall.
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I'm debugging some legacy VB X| code to figure out why a report is crashing, and encountered this fragment of SQL code:
e.TerminalType *= f.TerminalType:omg: The last time I encountered a left outer join specified in that way was probably 20 years ago. MarcImperative to Functional Programming Succinctly Contributors Wanted for Higher Order Programming Project! Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
We have a story (Gah! I hate Agile terminology.) to remove all those from our codebase. There are enough to make that a 2 sprint story.
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Quote:
e.TerminalType *= f.TerminalType
Isn't that just
e.TerminalType = e.TerminalType * f.TerminalType?V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)
In code, yes. In SQL that's an old-style JOIN syntax. http://sqlmag.com/t-sql/old-join-syntax-vs-new
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Exactly, and hair metal. I remember having hair metal back then. These days it's only plain metal :rolleyes:
Pretty sure hair metal was still around about 10 years ago. <pointless-anecdote> When I was in high school I'd take some old PC speakers and blast it in the corridor. One morning the French teacher who was a proper English lady asked me to turn it off because she had a headache. I didn't know what a hangover was at that age, but I'm pretty sure that was the real reason. </pointless-anecdote>
