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Admin
I sometimes like Mettwurst but metting one the other, I don't know...
Admin
Hmm. It seems very enterprisey, but I think I created an HTTP request to a funny web server, which sent back some sort of metadata, which were interpreted by my browser, and it now shows something like a UI. This must be a huge WTF.
Admin
I totally agree with you, it just seems that the guy who posted this and the others who agree with him are just lacking the experience in working with constantly changing business requirements that ripple into 10 different apps.
Where I work the business users have tons of spreadsheets that detail the requirements of the applications, if I had time I would love to generate application usable metadata from these excel files rather than code up the logic in 10 different systems and formats.
Admin
I was expecting the worst API ever below the fold, and instead I got Carl excelulating all over the place. WTF!
Admin
Progress is the activity of today and the assurance of tomorrow .
Admin
You know when you should use something other than a spreadsheet when you're forced to write self-modifying macros to get the job done.
Admin
How do you use this API? do you have to plug an USB hardware somewhere?
Admin
Isn't it fortune500 ?
Admin
Admin
The TRWTF is that the newbs decided they didn't want the guy's pretty decent GUI templating engine (even if used excel, but they could have fixed that), threw it all away, and spent lots of time rewriting everything. I'm sure the business appreciated they got to use their 'creativity' while they were wasting all that time in the rewrite.
No doubt one day one of them will think "hey, rather than hand-code all this, we could write a generation tool and then define all our gui elements in a text file or something and have it do all the boring work for us".
Admin
Admin
There's nothing in the definition of "data base" that stipulates the use of rows. Or queries. Oh, you meant "relational database"? Oh, well, never mind then
Admin
Admin
It's "en garde". The fact that you don't pronounce the 'u' in 'guerre', and in fact you don't pronounce half of the letters in French, doesn't mean you can just chuck it in a word somewhere.
Admin
Hmm... posting simply the BBCode URL generates this message and gets the post rejected, so it seems Alex has taken our cries for help with the spam seriously.
[image]Admin
I bet Joel Spolsky didn't have this use-case in mind when he was Excel Program Manager at Microsoft.
Admin
The meaning of a word has little to do with the construction of a word, as you well know. In this case, you're confusing a possible early germanic construction (adjective+preterite verb) with the more likely modern anglo-saxon construction (adjective+noun, verbalised and then gerundised).
Truth? No. Beauty? No. Sometimes you have to reach beyond tenth grade (and I'm not being sarcastic here, I'm trying to emphasise a point), and work out what you can do yourself, because "you're worth it."
Well, take this post as an example. There are other ways of enumerating your argument, but if you're going to count "quotes," you could at least "quote" them. The site software suffices for this purpose. Yes, possibly: in yer average Texan bar.Outside such venues, this sounds perilously close to a three-second guide to alcohol-assisted rape. (Not that Julius would have objected to that ... provided he was on the right end.)
Admin
And look, forget that Urban Cowboy crap. No matter where they set the movie, it was still Hollywood-shows-how-it-thinks-Texas-ought-to-be. We're really not that two-dimensional.
Admin
I recall a time when a girl I was dating in high school and I were headed in to the music store to replace a broken string on my dad's guitar.
Yes. I told her mother that we were "going to buy a new G-string for my dad."
Whoops.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Poor engineering practices are poor engineering practices, regardless of the medium involved. I'm working hard to transition a team of anthropologists developing a simulation away from exactly the development practice you describe and to proper source control.
The problem is the practice of emailing shit around, not the file being edited. Please note that the anecdote's boss' use of the Excel file was in a read-only manner, which makes your argument ridiculous.
Admin
I think you need to really look at a TRULY well-written GUI code. Complexity != ugliness.
The main problem with storing the metadata in a spreadsheet are:
That's what XML, or perhaps a JSON-like structure or a textual DSL would come in place. EMF, model transformations anyone?
This problem is similar to storing transactional relational data in a highly denormalized table.
There is no easy way to apply semantic or syntactic checkers on the metadata. Well, you could, but that'd be one ugly bunch of VBA code when you already have tried and true tools for that job at your disposal were you to use a standard hierarchical format or use some standard model transformation mechanism.
Knowledge transfer and maintenance. How long does it take for a new person to be proficient at maintaining and extending this abomination as opposed to maintaining and extending a functionally equivalent solution using standard tools?
By your admission, the choice of tools and format are not ideal. That is your WTF right there. If there are tried and true tools for that kind of job out, then what is the justification for doing this? Stupidity? Ignorance? Incompetence? Hero-worship-building syndrome?
If someone hires me to develop a web site that simply puts a read-only table on the internet, I could perhaps do it in assembler, store my configuration files in an Excel spreadsheet, and with my web pages rendered according to data stored in tables within Word documents.
Or I could use a tool for the job (Grails, Ruby on Rails, Django, JSP/ASP, pick a choice here).
Which one do you think will be the most justified, most professional and intelligent choice here?
The only time something that is not ideal gets justified as a solution is when you have real constrains that prevents you from doing better. What kind of justification could you or anyone come up with for this kind of stupidity?
There are things called Software Engineering principles. Get familiar with those. Not knowing why this was a WTF while doing software development for a living is a WTF on itself.
Admin
The boss approves of this because he knows that if he wants something done, he only has to ask the cute secretary to ask me.
Admin
How would they go about fixing the templating system (and the executable) so that they'd use a non-excel format? You might as well throw it away. From direct experience in manipulating and extracting data from Excel file formats, I know that, when used for purposes other than storing tabular data and when treated as input files (as opposed to applications in their own right with VBA code in them), the file format itself leads the internal architecture of the application in question.
For comparison, imagine you have an application that access data from a hierarchical database model and you need to change it to use a network model. Not to a relational model (which is fundamentally different) but to a network model which can be seen as an extension of the former.
Do you think you can superficially make the change, both in the data architecture and on the code that access it, without having to make substantial changes to the architecture? Man, let's just stick to relational model. Ever tried to migrate data from one, less normalized model to another more normalized (o vicerversa when you make a strategic decision to denormalize some tables for the sake of performance)?
Going back to this example, do you really think such an application can be rewritten with minimal effort so that it uses a different file format? There is a point where you might as well re-write from scratch.
You might have a point if we know for a fact that the application was written in such a way as to allow the swapping of file formats. But considering the tremendous error in selecting Excel for this task, I highly doubt the designer created the application in a layered manner that'd allow for such transparent changes.
And for those who still think using Excel wasn't a WTF that required a complete rewrite, let me ask you this:
If you put the file under source control (which you should, otherwise you are a moron), how do you track changes on the excel file?
Can you diff? Can you compare deltas? Or do you have to store entire versions of the file and do a visual diff (a tarded way to do things in this time and age)? You can even track individual changes on RDBMs tables if you design them for that. You don't think you need this kind of capability for long-term maintenance and extensibility of systems? God help you then, and I hope I never had to work with you.
Again, my main question in my previous post: how do you syntactic and semantic checking? If you don't do these kind of things, remember that these aren't the 1970's-1980's anymore.
The RWTF is that there are code-tards in this time and age who think using Excel as input files for code generation is acceptable, specially now in these time and age when we have been having more suitable formats for years.
I was recently listening to one of the Java Posse's podcasts ("Staffing Agile Teams", episode #260). Incidentally they were talking about these, otherwise normal people that build these intricate systems just to claim a Hero/Magician/l33t hax0r role.
This was one prime example.
Admin
As quoted by Victor Borge:
"The difference between a violin and a viola is that a viola burns longer."
Admin
Oh, oh, I see. Bar + drunken sex. Yup, looks unhurried and skillful and seductive to me. Tried it in normal places, like Oklahoma?
OK, I take that last one back...
Admin
As long as it's not violas on television!!