• Database Guru (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I develop primarily in VBA. Mostly Access front end and, if I get my way, SQL Server back end. Yes, Access is not the most desirable back end, but sometimes the company's vision or budget won't allow us to develop in the environment we'd prefer.

    SQL Server 2005 Express is free to download and deploy and supports databases up to 4GB. There is no reason on God's green earth that anybody should use Access as a backend.

    Of course, there are much better databases out there than Microsoft SQL Server; but that's another discussion.

  • (cs) in reply to JamesQMurphy
    JamesQMurphy:
    That's been my experience too. I was once working on a statistical app -- I was doing the calculation engine (in C++), while someone else did the front-end in VB. We wanted to display the name of the currently active (Access) database on the toolbar, but the problem was, the full path didn't fit. The VB programmer actually put a marquee control in the toolbar, to make the path fit. The colors? Neon green on black. Thankfully, my boss nixed the idea, and instead instructed him to use elipsis marks (C:\...\access.mdb) to make the path fit, in default toolbar colors, with a tooltip for the full path.

    People tend to emulate the crappy UIs they use every day.

    The solution in your case: go in and delete the VB programmer's copy of WinAmp.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Last summer I was working for a school district with a setup similar to this.

    Okay, maybe not entirely like that, it was VistA based, so the color scheme was better, and rather than completely broken, there were just tons of fields in the db that didn't make sense. I remember working out of my bosses office and there was a giant map of all the fields, and stuff like absences was recorded in a calendar table...which is fine...except it was only for the first 5 days and the remaining 26 had nothing.

    I needed to export test grades to the state education dept, so in order to do this, I couldn't just query and pull up all the grades from courseid X. Instead, I get a list of all the teachers who taught it. I then needed to use the intranet backend for teachers, and had to login as every teacher who taught class X. I had a small hardcopy list of teacher's passwords, which thankfully never left the room.

    Combine it with the fact that the system seemingly duplicated students at random, and listed students who had left the class as active...it took a few weeks of logging in, copying to a text file, importing to Excel and doing some initial filtering, and then importing to Access in order to condition the output properly (the state db refused to accept exported text from excel, and I have no idea why), a fairly simple task took weeks to finish.

    Thankfully, the system is gone now...they migrated the database to a new one with a new frontend.

    The entire job I had done over the summer has now been replaced by a single mouseclick.

  • Asiago Chow (unregistered)

    The reasonableness of the price would depend on how much custom coding the guy thought was required. If he figured it would actually be a month's time due to reuse, and figured he could concurrently do a few other jobs, he might well be looking at 120-300K/yr which was respectable amount for a solo developer in the late 90s.

    It could be that many of the WTFs (like the lunch ordering system) came from reuse of code intended for another application.

    Not defending the guy... just pointing out that the price may be a reflection of the requirements presented rather than a lowballing developer.

    As for verbing nouns...this is English, and in English we verb nouns. That is because English is an analytic language, not an inflected language, so there really isn't much difference between verbs and nouns. You can find verbing examples going back as far as we have records of written English. If you have a problem with the practice...you have a problem.

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    Wow, I didn't even know trebuchet was a verb!

    learnerize yourself, it has been verbated.

  • Marc TSG (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    I read all this with incredulity, but the real WTF was at the bottom. $10,000? Maybe for enough seats of an off the shelf product for the whole faculty, but for custom software? The school shouldn't have been at all surprised with what they god.

  • (cs)

    That actually sounds like it would be a decent project to work on. And they give it to some guy who ruins it.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Kingsley Zissou

    Spoken like someone who has never actually utilized VB.

    There are things it is not well suited for, and there are areas where it excels. Tool bashing or evangelism are both signs of a poor developer.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Kingsley Zissou
    Kingsley Zissou:
    AMerrickanGirl:
    HerrSchmidt:
    Well, to me "Visual Basic development" is an oxymoron, like "Microsoft Works"...

    I'm tired of people lumping all VB apps and all VB programmers into one dismal group. There are plenty of well designed VB apps developed by talented professionals. You just don't hear about them on the Daily WTF.

    That's because they don't exist - like tooth fairies, Santa Claus, free government money, and start trek transporters. Sure, the idea sounds great, but reality doesn't allow it.

    {quoting got lost before)

    Spoken like someone who has never actually utilized VB.

    There are things it is not well suited for, and there are areas where it excels. Tool bashing or evangelism are both signs of a poor developer.

  • TallGuy (unregistered)
    Jake Vinson:
    <blink wtf="No support for blink tags in IE? IE users don't know what they're missing! Score one for Firefox and Opera!">blink</blink>

    I hate you so much right now, Jake...

  • (cs) in reply to zoips
    zoips:
    FredSaw:
    ...was finally able to trebuchet themselves into the 21st century...
    Wow, I didn't even know trebuchet was a verb!

    Verbing weirds the language.

    [image]

  • mizchief (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    HerrSchmidt:
    Well, to me "Visual Basic development" is an oxymoron, like "Microsoft Works"...

    I'm tired of people lumping all VB apps and all VB programmers into one dismal group. There are plenty of well designed VB apps developed by talented professionals. You just don't hear about them on the Daily WTF.

    I develop primarily in VBA. Mostly Access front end and, if I get my way, SQL Server back end. Yes, Access is not the most desirable back end, but sometimes the company's vision or budget won't allow us to develop in the environment we'd prefer.

    Sometimes you have to work with the tools you're given. And there are plenty of incompetent software developers who create shitty apps using Java, C#, C++, Ruby, Lisp, Python and every other language known to man. VB/VBA people are just easy pickings because it takes the least amount of training to hack together a database, so a lot of bottom feeders end up creating crap. But not all of us!

    No. There is really no excuse for using Access in ANY multi-user application. If you have the money to buy MSSQL or the like then grab a copy of MySQL or postgre. Access is only good for storing some data that is link to excel or work for mail merging.

    Visual Basic was a fine language back in the VB6 days for making simple interfaces when your only other choice was C++. But have you looked at a VB.net 3.5 app? All of the extra OOP concepts like generics and event handling just don't apply to that syntax very well.

    Once your mind figures out what a '{' or a '(' does C# is very easy to learn espically if you already have a VB.net background.

  • The Wanderer (unregistered) in reply to Havok
    Havok:
    Anyway, i want an screenshot! Man this sounds like the worse application ever made.

    Although it may be bad enough to compete, I doubt it can take that crown from SSDS.

    Of course, never having attempted to use either, I cannot personally say for certain.

  • pmv (unregistered)

    "Each product in the suite had one thing in common with all of the other products in the suite — the seizure-inducing UI and being completely useless."

    Wouldn't that be two things in common?

  • JamesQMurphy (unregistered) in reply to Asiago Chow
    Asiago Chow:
    The reasonableness of the price would depend on how much custom coding the guy thought was required. If he figured it would actually be a month's time due to reuse, and figured he could concurrently do a few other jobs, he might well be looking at 120-300K/yr which was respectable amount for a solo developer in the late 90s.

    It could be that many of the WTFs (like the lunch ordering system) came from reuse of code intended for another application.

    Not defending the guy... just pointing out that the price may be a reflection of the requirements presented rather than a lowballing developer.

    (snip)

    That's a good point; it sounds like there were no written requirements at all. The fact that the attendance system didn't take into account the "excused absence" use case -- did the school just assume that the guy would know about it? Yes, an experienced developer would ask first, but IMO it sounds like a WTF on both sides.
  • CaptainSmartass (unregistered) in reply to Saaid
    Saaid:
    zoips:
    FredSaw:
    ...was finally able to trebuchet themselves into the 21st century...
    Wow, I didn't even know trebuchet was a verb!

    Verbing weirds the language.

    I guess this makes English a loosely typed language.

    Sure it is, just look at the integer 6, which can be easily cast as a string when used as a given name "Six".

  • ZoomingAroundLikeABalloon (unregistered)

    Thanks for reminding me I need to turn off my blink tag since I installed firefox 3. :-)

  • Salami (unregistered) in reply to nick davis
    nick davis:
    Perhaps the school's willingness to only spend $10k on a system of this magnitude might have created this entire situation?

    The magnitude wasn't that great. They only needed an app to monitor the grades. The rest was gravy.

  • Ranxerox (unregistered)

    Custom software costs a lot of money. The idea that they could get all those requirements custom coded for $10,000 is ludicrous.

    Sadly, most people don't comprehend the difference between off-the-shelf software that is amortized over many sales and custom software that must be completely paid for by a single user.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Zylon

    I'm better than you!

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to jtwine
    jtwine:
    Horrible use of colors on controls and window backgrounds?

    Well, all that just SCREAMS Visual Basic developer (and I use the term loosely) to me... :)

    -=- James.

    While I believe you meant to insult Visual Basic developers, what you've actually done is insult DEVELOPERS. This guy couldn't "develop" his way out of bed. Let's remember that just because a lot of non-developers might think they're programmers because they can use VB, doesn't make VB bad. It makes stupid people bad. Good developers can (and very often do) create very useful applications using VB, PHP, and any of the other less popular languages among the elitist developer crowd.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to helpfulcorn
    helpfulcorn:
    The school I worked at we had a similar piece of software, but it was lime green. Fortunately, we were able to read buttons, but there were many other problems. This was the late 90s and most of the machines we had were running Windows 95 or 98 and had usually 32MB RAM. The software itself was a single large executable written in Visual FoxPro, IIRC the size was something like 300MB.

    Needless to say, the software simply would not run on teacher machines, what we did ws setup Terminal Services and used a server with something like 16GB RAM to handle it all, but even then, if all the teachers had it open, it would easily lag.

    It took nearly a year for the developer to work out all the bugs. The icon was a smiley face and he REFUSED to change it to anything else, sometimes to the point where he'd scream at us on the phone about it.

    Heh, 16 GB of RAM in the late 90s on a WinNT 4.0 Terminal Server... Somehow I doubt it...

    Wonder how much 16 GB of RAM would have cost back then, even if it was possible!

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    Sometimes you have to work with the tools you're given. And there are plenty of incompetent software developers who create shitty apps using Java, C#, C++, Ruby, Lisp, Python and every other language known to man.

    Oh yeah, I am stuck working with some real short-bus quality "developers" who created one of the worst database applications I have ever seen.. and they used Java. It has been the worst 9 months of my professional career, despite being responsible for a raise to the highest salary I've ever earned.

  • Michael Mrozek (unregistered) in reply to MmmVomit

    I read the whole first paragraph without figuring out what was going on, I just knew something was driving me crazy but I couldn't put my finger on it. I finally stopped reading and stared aimlessly so I could figure out there was a word blinking in the middle of the story

  • A Gould (unregistered) in reply to OzPeter
    OzPeter:
    I prefer the analogy that if you gave a bad music student the most expensive piano you could buy, you would still hear crap from them. But if you gave Mozart a crappy piano you would still get some of the best music in the world.

    Only to a point - give Mozart a crappy out-of-tune piano, or one where some of the keys don't work, and you'll get a substantial loss in quality. (And it doesn't take much - break one key on a piano, and it's amazing how many tunes you can't play).

    Quality of tool is just as important as quality of user - one can compensate or compliment the other, but there's a minimum below no which no amount of help will do.

  • (cs) in reply to dysmas
    dysmas:
    FredSaw:
    Wow, I didn't even know trebuchet was a verb!

    learnerize yourself, it has been verbated.

    I could expositionalize at length about it, but I'd just be verbosing.
  • (cs) in reply to Ozz
    Ozz:
    OzPeter:
    But if you gave Mozart a crappy piano you would still get some of the best music in the world.
    Wow - and I thought Mozart was dead...
    Yes... in an ironic reversal, now he's decomposing. (boom tish)
  • Dude (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    HerrSchmidt:
    Well, to me "Visual Basic development" is an oxymoron, like "Microsoft Works"...

    I'm tired of people lumping all VB apps and all VB programmers into one dismal group. There are plenty of well designed VB apps developed by talented professionals. You just don't hear about them on the Daily WTF.

    I develop primarily in VBA. Mostly Access front end and, if I get my way, SQL Server back end. Yes, Access is not the most desirable back end, but sometimes the company's vision or budget won't allow us to develop in the environment we'd prefer.

    Sometimes you have to work with the tools you're given. And there are plenty of incompetent software developers who create shitty apps using Java, C#, C++, Ruby, Lisp, Python and every other language known to man. VB/VBA people are just easy pickings because it takes the least amount of training to hack together a database, so a lot of bottom feeders end up creating crap. But not all of us!

    Budged wont allow? Not if you do it in with Open Source projects as CSharpDeveloper and MySQL.

    If i woud start building, I could even think to do it in PHP. For Free if they woud allow to open a source.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    Sure, VB programmers are stereotyped, but per capita VB owns the most bad programmers for the reason you have stated. That's just another reason for the "serious" and "professional" vb programmers to shell out $50 and buy a book on a "real" programming platform.

    You have a point on Access vs SQL Server, but I can hardly imagine a scenario when you're forced to start a new product with VB versus say C++. (I won't say C# or java because those are not native to Windows and require an intermediate-level platform/framework installation)

  • Blobster (unregistered) in reply to A Gould
    A Gould:
    Only to a point - give Mozart a crappy out-of-tune piano, or one where some of the keys don't work, and you'll get a substantial loss in quality. (And it doesn't take much - break one key on a piano, and it's amazing how many tunes you can't play).

    Quality of tool is just as important as quality of user - one can compensate or compliment the other, but there's a minimum below no which no amount of help will do.

    That's not an appropriate analogy. A piano with broken keys cannot play every tune. VB may be harder to play certain tunes in, but it can play any tune that can be played in any mainstream language. A piano with broken keys would be more analogous to a programming language that doesn't support recursion. VB can be used to compute any value that is computable on deterministic hardware. It would be more analogous to a properly-functioning, properly-tuned piano, where the key placement makes it easy to learn but more difficult to play certain strings of notes. Still entirely possible, but just more difficult.

  • (cs) in reply to A Gould
    A Gould:
    OzPeter:
    But if you gave Mozart a crappy piano you would still get some of the best music in the world.

    Only to a point - give Mozart a crappy out-of-tune piano, or one where some of the keys don't work, and you'll get a substantial loss in quality. (And it doesn't take much - break one key on a piano, and it's amazing how many tunes you can't play).

    I don't think you are being fair to VB, as other have pointed out VB is turing complete, so it still has all the keys. Even VBScript (which makes VB look great) is still a useable language.

    But to move on to your piano analogy. If you remove one key from a piano, doesn't it effectively just mask out only those notes of any base key that would use that particular key (gotta love using key for two different meanings!) Thus a sufficiently talented musician could move the key of the tune up or down and hence still play the overall piece (albeit with a changed mood)?

    Of course once you start removing more and more keys then it soon becomes impossible.

  • (cs) in reply to nick davis
    nick davis:
    Perhaps the school's willingness to only spend $10k on a system of this magnitude might have created this entire situation?

    I agree. Even if I was the only developer, being paid only for my time and at my current co-op student rates, I'd still expect the budget to be about 4-5 times that. A good product with these specifications could easily be upwards of a year's worth of man hours.

  • (cs) in reply to anon

    Hmm, perhaps it wasn't that much at first, but I do know eventually we did have a server like that, I honestly can't remember anymore. When I left we had two with about 32 GB running 2000 Datacenter (We had way too much money).

  • RobP (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    AMerrickanGirl, I couldn't agree more!

  • Mr. Eff (unregistered) in reply to Saaid
    Saaid:
    zoips:
    FredSaw:
    ...was finally able to trebuchet themselves into the 21st century...
    Wow, I didn't even know trebuchet was a verb!

    Verbing weirds the language.

    I guess this makes English a loosely typed language.

    English == PHP.

  • Mr. Eff (unregistered) in reply to Database Guru
    Database Guru:
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I develop primarily in VBA. Mostly Access front end and, if I get my way, SQL Server back end. Yes, Access is not the most desirable back end, but sometimes the company's vision or budget won't allow us to develop in the environment we'd prefer.

    SQL Server 2005 Express is free to download and deploy and supports databases up to 4GB. There is no reason on God's green earth that anybody should use Access as a backend.

    Of course, there are much better databases out there than Microsoft SQL Server; but that's another discussion.

    I agree with the sentiment that Access is a poor choice, but SQL Express is equally poor in most situations. If the app installs client-side on a end-user's machine, or if the data files need to be moved, or if you just don't want to deal with the ridiculous requirements or installation issues with SQL Express it's a poor choice.

    Firebird SQL is a significantly better choice for client-deployed databases and maintains the simple, single-file database structure. SQL Express is a pain in the ass.

  • (cs) in reply to OzPeter
    OzPeter:
    If you remove one key from a piano, doesn't it effectively just mask out only those notes of any base key that would use that particular key (gotta love using key for two different meanings!) Thus a sufficiently talented musician could move the key of the tune up or down and hence still play the overall piece (albeit with a changed mood)?

    You obviously don't know much about Jazz :-). If you were playing Heart and Soul, sure you could transpose it on the fly. Anything more complicated could use the entire octave, regardless of what key you're in.

  • Herby (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    In addition to all the other WTFs in this article, may I point out the nutritional absurdity of offering pizza, chips, and soda as a lunchtime option.

    No wonder we're turning into a bloated bunch of fatsos.

    Oy vey

    Oh, but you forget. The pizza was vegetarian, the chips organic, and the soda diet. Problem solved (much like the described WTF!)

  • MrsPost (unregistered)

    I've always referred to these kinds of apps as "garage apps". As in, someone with a business out of their garage pounded out this garbage on a keyboard. Using their feet. Encased in ski boots.

    I've had the privilege of working with some of these things. I'm the lucky duck who gets to look them over and then explain why they can't be moved from Access to SQL.

    I suppose technically they could but management wisely decrees that it would not be cost effective to use their senior database analyst in such a manner and suggests the offending department hire their own contractor to do the conversion. And the support after the conversion.

    Wow. My management does one thing right. That's a switch.

  • Donny (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I'm tired of people lumping all VB apps and all VB programmers into one dismal group. There are plenty of well designed VB apps developed by talented professionals. You just don't hear about them on the Daily WTF.
    At the risk of sounding like a VB Developer (pffft), I agree. I've worked with someone that came up from C++ to VB, and the stuff they're able to do with plain old VB6 beats the crud out of most things I've seen from a lot of developers that swear the devil wrote VB.
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I develop primarily in VBA. Mostly Access front end and, if I get my way, SQL Server back end. Yes, Access is not the most desirable back end, but sometimes the company's vision or budget won't allow us to develop in the environment we'd prefer.
    Here.. I have to wince a bit. Access as a backend? Sheesh, ever heard of MySQL? Free. Fully capable - in some cases more so than the likes of Oracle (blegh) or SQLServer (blegher)
  • Sigivald (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    If "a majority of the folks ... agree that VB ... is in and of itself a WTF." then they are what we in the industry call wrong.

    All the majority in the world won't make them correct.

  • Whaleman (unregistered) in reply to OzPeter
    OzPeter:
    I don't think you are being fair to VB, as other have pointed out VB is turing complete, so it still has all the keys. Even VBScript (which makes VB look great) is still a useable language.

    Turing-completness is almost no indication for the quality of language. For example Brainfuck is Turing-complete but i don't think anyone would choose it in a productive environment.

  • (cs) in reply to Blobster
    Blobster:
    A Gould:
    Only to a point - give Mozart a crappy out-of-tune piano, or one where some of the keys don't work, and you'll get a substantial loss in quality. (And it doesn't take much - break one key on a piano, and it's amazing how many tunes you can't play).

    Quality of tool is just as important as quality of user - one can compensate or compliment the other, but there's a minimum below no which no amount of help will do.

    That's not an appropriate analogy. A piano with broken keys cannot play every tune. VB may be harder to play certain tunes in, but it can play any tune that can be played in any mainstream language. A piano with broken keys would be more analogous to a programming language that doesn't support recursion. VB can be used to compute any value that is computable on deterministic hardware. It would be more analogous to a properly-functioning, properly-tuned piano, where the key placement makes it easy to learn but more difficult to play certain strings of notes. Still entirely possible, but just more difficult.

    Mapping any analogy between the diatonic scale and Turing completeness is fairly futile, surely?

    I would suggest that a better analogy for VB, keyboard-wise, is with those horrible home-based Hammond organ things that were so popular back in the 1980s when proud middle-class parents wanted to show off how bright Little Johnny was.

    Parents: And now, the Bossa Nova! Little Johnny: (Presses key marked "Bossa Nova." Tinkly sound ensues.) Audience: Clap politely, wondering whether it's too early to ask for another triple gin and tonic. Mother: (It was always the mother. Don't ask me why.) Play us a Tune, Little Johnny! Little Johnny: (Bangs head repeatedly on keyboard.)

    There. You want an appropriate analogy? That's an appropriate analogy.

    Curious how you don't see domestic Hammond organs around much, any more.

  • Manic Mailman (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    In addition to all the other WTFs in this article, may I point out the nutritional absurdity of offering pizza, chips, and soda as a lunchtime option.

    Don't forget, chips are a vegetable.

    And trebuchet is a perfectly cromulent verb.

  • SuperQ (unregistered) in reply to lol
    lol:
    The blink tag distracted me when i was reading the article :(
    about:config

    browser.allow_blink = false

    Another good one is dom.disable_window_move_resize = true

  • Endaar (unregistered)

    Sadly, this sounds pretty much like any school management system. At least this one was cheap.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Never mind the blinking text, why are the subheadings in white-on-white?

  • (cs) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I'm tired of people lumping all VB apps and all VB programmers into one dismal group. There are plenty of well designed VB apps developed by talented professionals. You just don't hear about them on the Daily WTF.

    I totally agree.

    Anyways:

    jtwine:
    Blinking text? (WTF!)

    Well, all that just SCREAMS Visual Basic developer (and I use the term loosely) to me... :)

    you can do blinking buttons/text in VB? I didn't know that! Plz send me teh codez...

  • (cs) in reply to Manic Mailman
    Manic Mailman:
    Steve:
    In addition to all the other WTFs in this article, may I point out the nutritional absurdity of offering pizza, chips, and soda as a lunchtime option.

    Don't forget, chips are a vegetable.

    And trebuchet is a perfectly cromulent verb.

    I'm a little worried by this. Why is "cromulent" always "perfect?"

    Is it possible to be imperfectly cromulent? Or to all intents and purposes cromulent? Or statistically cromulent?

    Don't get me wrong; it's a fine adjective. I just don't want to see it die a death because it was born with implicit arthritis.

    And, on the assumption that it's a gerundive, what's the verb?

  • (cs) in reply to SuperQ
    SuperQ:
    about:config

    browser.allow_blink = false

    You mean "browser.blink_allowed", of course.

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