So I gave a dev a choice yesterday

Rob Grainger

Stefan63 wrote:

knowing that most of today's C++ programs could be compiled with compilers written 20 years ago

Wow, your usage of C++ must really be avoiding the "new" features then. Template support back then was crappy to put it mildly - and IMHO to ignore templates is to miss the one really good thing in C++. Forget the "class" in C++, its the keyword "template" that makes it powerful. There is other stuff that's changed in that time, but the template differences have affected almost every part of the standard library for the better - strings have been vastly improved, STL and BOOST all rely heavily on these. Even books like "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu came out in that time frame.

Isfeasachme

Hello, this is the business. We have a user who needs to automate a few things in excel. You can either spend 3 months writing custom code that duplicates 20% of the functionality of spreadsheet software plus this user requirement, or spend a day writing a few quick routines in VBA. ... oh... you don't huh. That's too bad.

Isfeasachme

LOL nobody says XL for Excel.

Dalek Dave

Microsoft Does[^]

------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]

Isfeasachme

I know this is rapidly heading off topic, but I love writing documentation - especially functional specs. It gives me a sandbox to think through all of the behaviors of a piece of software before I lay down the first bit of code. I'm always amazed at the necessary bits that float up while I'm writing. Writing user documentation is great, too. It helps me spot ways the app can be streamlined for usability. Documenting workarounds for bugs deep in the queue helps me sympathize with user frustration, too. "... your figures should be in the right column, but they have disappeared. This is a bug, but there is a workaround. To get the figures to display, open and close the print preview." X|

Stefan_Lang

Rob Grainger wrote:

Wow, your usage of C++ must really be avoiding the "new" features then

Not at all, to the contrary. I'm liberally using templates all the time. I've expressed myself not very well it seems - I wasn't referring to the state of C++ around 25 years ago that I intially described, but to C++ compilers 20 years ago, i. e. around 1991, which were already much better and had full support for templates, with very few exceptions, and one-pass compilation. These compilers should be able to compile most if not all of the STL (although they'll likely get stumped by the boost library) Note that at that time, even though the ANSI standard for C++ wasn't released yet, most of it was already supported by compilers.

wizardzz

I was given the task of "fixing" a project similar to the one you described. I bitched to my dev friends about it for a solid day. In the end, I just rewrote it into a C# GUI. It turns out currency brokers like custom GUIs more than Excel.

SeattleC

Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I've been a dev for 30 years and I haven't used VBA for excel. I've done documentation though, so my choice would be pretty simple.

Rob Grainger

Too right. I've been tasked with working on some Access VBA code for my sins, and the IDE drives me crazy. It can't seem to tell the difference between field names (which are ALLCAPS here) and variable names (camelCase or InitialCaps depending on scope), or between names at different scopes, so the IDE just randomly chooses one and makes everything throughout your project match that. It drives me frickin' crazy - earlier I actually added a new class (Class Module), the name of which didn't overlap anything in the project, called it, ClassName and VBFA (VB Frickin' A, its new acronym) decided that that should CLASSNAME - this is a new class. It's about time Microsoft put the poor beast out to pasture and replaced it throughout the office suite with a .NET based scripting environment. That way you could use C#, Ruby, Python, or even, god forbid VB, at personal/project manager preference.

Rob Grainger

Really? In 1991? That's back when the latest Microsoft Compiler was C 6 (not C++ 6, Visual C++ 1.0 came out in 1992). Turbo C++ and Zortech C++ were the best compilers for DOS platform, neither of which had any support for templates at that stage. STL was still under development at the time, and AFAIK most compilers that did support templates had to be reengineered to avoid breaking, it was some years later before everything started supporting templates efficiently. I remember reading an article about template metaprogramming in, I think, Dr Dobb's, at time - the classic calculate a factorial and report it in an error message example. At that stage, none of the compilers they tried could support it. You must have been very lucky to be developing on a platform with such advanced C++ support so early, the rest of us took a fair few years to catch up. Even VC++ 6 (that 6 compilers later from Microsoft) still failed to have decent support for STL - breaking any implementation I tried, until MS released one (in a Service Pack if I remember correctly).

Lost User

There's far too much "over-engineering" in the software development world, it seems to me...

I could not agree more. -Max :D

Kent K

Nice description. . .and true in some cases. :thumbsup:

Rob Grainger

I thought much the same until I tried to setup some numbering based on Heading levels (style-based) in Word 2007. It is possessed, despite Microsoft's protestations to the contrary (Blogs.Office.Com[^]). That they felt the need to write an article titled that way is condemnation itself. Numbers change to letters, indentation flies halfway across the page. You get it "working" save, and reopen a document to find everything screwed again. I've been using Word since Word for Windows 1.0, and VBA with it a fair few years. All all started going wrong post Word 6, when they started "intellisensing" too much - adding styles because you'd made a stretch of text bold and the like.

Stefan_Lang

I was programming C++ code on Sun workstations starting in 1986, and even though template support was all but non-existant, the compiler prototypes provided to the research institute I was working at could indeed 'understand' some very basic template constructs. I do remember having had several discussions with a tutor about constructs the CPP frontend didn't understand which should have worked by the book. My understanding was the CPP frontend was only used in some universities at the time, mainly for educational purposes. Much later we got updates to the CPP frontend which was able to do multiple passes over the code instead of just one, and thus could recursively resolve nested template arguments. That was in the late 80s, I think about 1988-89. That version was very close to full template support. I got a new job at a software company in 1991, and the project I was working on then did liberally use templates; this was the first time I really used templates to their 'full' potential (or rather, to the limits of my uderstanding ;) ) I do not recall any restrictions on the use of templates our compilers imposed on us, that is why I say these compilers should have been able to deal with todays C++ code. (platforms were HP, Sun, and Spark workstations btw., not PCs)

Jason Christian

I think most of these replies miss the main point - VBA is easy, whether it is ugly or not. Any developer that can't figure out how to hack up some macros in Excel isn't worth squat. It is designed to be used by non-programmers, and I know plenty of accountant types that can throw together a macro (usually starting with the record function and tweeking from there) - so if someone calling themselves a programmer cannot figure it out, they should find a new occupation.

Fabio Franco

Yey, one can still develop against excel without using any vba at all... So, yes, I pass...

Middle Manager

The most annoying feature of the IDE for sure must be the compile error popup message box. I mean, couldn't they imagine a scenario where I have left code purposely incomplete -- maybe to copy a variable name so I can paste it in, or any other normal workflow reason that just about every modern IDE supports? Okay, even if they have to compile the line immediately after moving off it did they have to tell you with a modal message box? Seriously, the guy who approved that feature deserves some kind of special hell.

Lost User

Slobos wrote:

Programming in VBA is very useful. I did some for ACAD, Word and Excel. It's easy, all you have to do is press F1 and learn few new commands. Still, overworked people can't do that. Or people that use drugs. Or people that hate their bosses for some reason. Or just too comfortable and arrogant people...

Agreed. I really have to laugh at the elitist attitude on this board, especially when dealing with subjects like VB and/or VB6. There have been entire INDUSTRIES spring up around the code written in VB6 and VBA and the developers here really seem to look down on it. It's hilarious in one way and sad in another. To "diss" skills that a developer might have in using those tools is very high-school IMHO. In my case I've spent the last 12 years developing and maintaining a system that is largely built on VB6 and VB.Net. Yes, we do have increasing amounts of the code in C# and I, myself, now only develop new code in C# - but it seems that the attitude around here is that if you used VB6 you are somehow a lesser skilled programmer. Let me put it this way. If that's your attitude, then I reserve you the exclusive rights of being WRONG. -Max

Fabio Franco

Not necessarily. You don't need to use VBA to develop aginst excel. It's possible to do it with C# and use the office libs the same way you'd do with VBA. With another advantage that you can do more stuff, you're not stuck with only VBA capabilities.

Sasa Cetkovic

I think that you can do everything that can be done in VBA (and more) using Visual Studio. I'm not talking about over-engineering, but simply writing Office pluggins using VSTO.