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

    Purple prose is the way to go!

    ...were finally able to launch themselves toward technological utopia as if fired from a trebuchet at the castle walls of achievement...

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Blobster
    Blobster:
    The "ratio" or sheer quantity of relatively unskilled VB programmers is not relevant to consideration of the language itself. It's just stereotyping.
    I prefer to call it "Bayesian inference", thank you very much.
  • Anonymous (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.

    You assume that the company you work for will allow you to use this software.

  • Dirk Gently (unregistered)

    I believe this should be: you have to decide whether you're going to eat xor drink

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    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.

    Access is a fantastic front-end (no, it's not a DB!!!) with which you can create things in some hours. But it also has it's limitations. In any case you should avoid AT ALL COST using data-aware controls. I'm pretty sure that that was were the trouble came from (apart from bad DB design, not using primary keys, and the like). So, if somebody thinks Access is soooooo easy to use, just re-read this story. If you can't even program Access then better don't program in whatever language. You'll fail, anyway.

  • Bob Holness (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    A few really determined artists have made some amazing pictures using nothing but MS Paint, however this does not mean MS Paint is a good tool for producing art/design and does not mean that the vast majority of MS Paint users produce good art or design using it.

    In fact, I would go so far as to say that MS Paint users produce crap art/design and that MS Paint, itself, is crap. That, my friend, is a generalization and does not demerit the exceptional users of this application.

  • (cs) in reply to SenTree
    SenTree:
    FredSaw:
    poochner:
    No, no, NO! You missed a note! It's "bah-boom tish!" Bah-boom tish!
    How about "Bang Tish"? ...particularly if Tish is Carolyn Jones.
    I vote for Anjelica Huston - that wonderful aristocratic nose, just made for haughty stares...
    Carolyn had those huge expressive full-moon eyes. But I'm easy; Anjie'll work.
  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to sir_flexalot
    sir_flexalot:
    $10,000 is unbelievably cheap for a software solution that size... no wonder it was a piece of crap.

    I fail to sense your sarcasm :(

    Considering that the paper process is quite simple, an application to eliminate paper would be similarly simple, as a first step. I'm a big fan of stratified deployment of such solutions, where the first thing is to do what previous process did at least as well. It usually ends up being affordable and can actually save money by saving the time and hassle of moving paper around, and making the data accessible from mostly anywhere.

    The application in question is probably a kloc or two of Perl/Python, a few page templates, and a very simple database backend. A week to develop, a week to test/debug, a week to stage/deploy, and a week to do minor tweaks and talk the customers into further development. I'd gladly take $10k for a month worth of such work.

  • Kuba (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?

    I'm almost willing to bet that given expected traffic from an average school system, such an application could be hosted on Google's App Engine for free, so no recurring costs there. As for development expenses, $10k sounds about right for someone who'd factor in having to learn his Python first, so it'd take two months instead of a month of work. For someone who develops web apps in Python everyday, I'd expect that this should take at most a month of work to replace paper in this case, from start to finish (as in goodbyes said and next work engagement started).

  • AMerrickanGirl (unregistered) in reply to TakeASeatOverThere

    <Why are they using VB if they are "talented professionals"? Does their talent end on the Basic level?>

    So no programmer should agree to help a small business develop a database using Access and VBA if that's all they can afford? Or create some small apps for a department in a large company that can't get approval or funding for the IT department to build a more robust application?

    There's a market for these databases. Somebody has to build them. Not every programmer wants to be a tech wizard.

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Yuriy
    Yuriy:
    sir_flexalot:
    $10,000 is unbelievably cheap for a software solution that size... no wonder it was a piece of crap.

    My thoughts exactly. That's what you get for going with the lowest bid (or with your nephew's best friend's cousin's roommate).

    What's with you people?! "Solution that size"?! Come on, their main requirement I'm sure was to get rid of paper and make the information accessible (without lugging paper around). That's typically the first and main thing they want to improve, even if they don't realize it. I can't imagine this really calls for multiple man-months and payments in multi-10 k$ range. WTF?!

    A "solution of that size" is really a weeks worth of work for an initial implementation, and then about three weeks worth to tweak it / show it to the customer (rinse and repeat). Assuming a reasonable hosting platform, that is (something where you don't deal with upgrades, php.ini and crap like that).

    Even in times of dBase clients on 386 machines and spiffy new Novell installs running on 486 tower servers, this would have taken about a week worth of work for initial development. Today's paltforms are way more powerful and easier to work with. My high school (~800 students back then, IIRC), ran their stuff on 386 clients and said 486 "tower" server, and dBase worked just fine to run that shop. On monochrome VGA monitors, no less.

    Cheers, Kuba

  • AMerrickanGirl (unregistered) in reply to NiceTry
    NiceTry:
    AMerrickanGirl:
    I develop primarily in VBA.

    Nice try, AMerrickanGirl! Next time only pretend to be one mythical creature at a time - few of us wizened Internet folks believe in good VB developers and even fewer in women who would talk to us. Sorry, the empirical evidence is against you on this one.

    <insert>evil grin</insert>

    I don't know if I'm a good developer. Others who've seen my code and used my apps would have to be the judge of that.

    But for the record, I am a woman, and I hang on several IT boards. We're rare but we exist.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    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.

    You assume that the company you work for will allow you to use this software.

    A lot of Access bashers seem to be missing your point.

  • LN (unregistered) in reply to jtwine

    Bad GUI and design irrationally leading to the conclusion of "It must have been a VB developer?"

    Well that just SCREAMS moron (and I use the term explicitly) to me...

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    Or create some small apps for a department in a large company that can't get approval or funding for the IT department to build a more robust application?

    There's a market for these databases.

    Exactly. Anyone notice that Access is rather prevalent in the business world? It's not prevalent because it's the best DB for the job. That's for sure. But it's deployed everywhere, so using the tools the businesses already have isn't the worst thing to do, regardless of the tools.

    Coming into a situation and completely changing around their toolset isn't always the best thing to do. Even if the new toolset works better for a particular need of theirs.

  • Jimmy Jones (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that the school expect all that software, working, for $10k.

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Okay - so if VB is analogous to a broken piano, then you're telling me that everytime I compile my well-written, bug-free app and deliver it to the customer, it will be completely full of bugs and non-functional simply because of the toolset? You're saying that the toolset itself is inherently faulty?

    [...]

    Look, I've dealt with lots of programmers in my career, and I gotta tell you, I've worked with some real moron Java and C# and C++ programmers who couldn't code themselves out of a paper bag. Programming is an art, and you either got it or you don't. Your brushes, paint, canvas, etc.. are not what matters. And if you don't know that, then you aren't a programmer, you're just a whiner and a hater. Go hate someone at a convenience store and leave programming to the adults.

    I agree. In fact, I'd posit that there was a time -- just about when Windows 95 and VS 6 appeared -- that VB made a lot of sense and was easiest to use, and yielded code that was easiest to maintain in good many situations. VB, to me at least, was a big breakthrough in development speed. If you did it right in the first place of course. Hacks are equally bad no matter the toolset...

    Around that time I've made two small applications, both very much graphically oriented, in VB 6.

    One was a replacement to the broken DOS printing from Protel Autotrax. It'd load the PCB files and "render" them on a laser printer (transparencies!) using plain good old VB-wrapped GUI calls. Worked perfectly well, and I doubt that using any other language at that time would yield code that was equally readable/easy to maintain. On same hardware, on Windows 95, the VB solution was about an order of magnitude (kid you not) faster at generating print data than the compiled Autotrax's print application running in bare DOS and printing to a file.

    Another application was used to generate custom, randomized reading tests. It did text layout, among other things, using algorithms lifted off Knuth's texbook. It worked just fine on the 486 hardware we had available and LJ4 and similar vintage printers. An attempted port to Borland Pascal (my primary language at the time) had grown the codebase 3x, and I decided it was pointless to maintain the bigger code base just to have it in a more "professional" language. The VB solution, AFAIK, lived for a decade+, and did its job just fine. At the time it was developed, the limiting factor was still the laser printer speed; the app was about 4x faster in filling up the spooler than the printer could spit the pages out.

    Cheers!

  • CornedBee (unregistered)

    See, I just don't get this. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, universities around the world. There must be hundreds of thousands of schools.

    And yet, it seems like every single such institutions initially tries a specifically developed system.

  • AMerrickanGirl (unregistered) in reply to ericidle
    ericidle:
    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.

    Just use PostgreSQL. You get a commercial-grade native Windows database with odbc and all the bells and whistles you could want for the low, low price of zero dollars.

    There's really no need to use Access for anything, except some PHB forcing to use it.

    Have any of you "just use a better database" folks ever worked for a large company? Good luck convincing them to spend a dime on something that isn't already in house.

    I work for a corporation. Our database choices are:

    Oracle (they love this for all the internal IT development projects, even apps that aren't big enough to need it)

    SQL Server (not sure why they have it - hardly any apps actually use it)

    Access (this is what the departments outside of IT use when they need something and can't get a project approved to develop it properly). So the place is full of tiny Access databases.

    I am plagued with maintaining one app from hell that is an Access front end with (get this) TWO back ends - one is Access and one is SQL Server. A manager from hell managed to go around the IT department and bring in a Paula Bean level consultant to build this abortion. The consultant was somehow convinced that using SQL Server for the entire back end would be "too slow".

    It has lots of multi colored screens, which are among its least offensive features. Even if only one user is using it, it's horribly slow. Loading the first screen loads a query with all of the open cases, which can take up to a minute ... even if the user wants to see the closed cases, in which case they have to reload the screen again ... and wait. The security is a nightmare. Everyone hates this thing. After less than two years of use it's being gradually replaced by an Asp.net front end and Oracle back end, which is already much more popular.

    It kills me that this idiot was paid $150 an hour for many months and then went off to inflict himself on another victim.

    The nasty manager and the consultant are both long gone, but this thing has come back to bite us dozens of times. Any time we need to do something with it, it requires considerable workarounds.

    So yes, we who develop in Access recognize that it's not the proper tool for many situations, and we know bad code when we see it.

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Jimmy Jones
    Jimmy Jones:
    The real WTF is that the school expect all that software, working, for $10k.

    The real WTF is that there are people like you out there who think it should cost more. Limit the scope, stay sane, avoid enterprisiness, and you really need not turn it into a 12-headed monster.

    What is with people not seeing simple solutions to relatively simple problems? I admit I don't know how complex the school's paper-based process was, but I don't think it's the next Apollo mission control software, it isn't even craigslist.

    I'm sure that school board would be willing to extend on a bare-bone IT solution in due time; suggesting that they develop something big, heavy and expensive from the get-go is a recipe for another virtual case file. Nuff said.

    Cheers

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to CornedBee
    CornedBee:
    See, I just don't get this. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, universities around the world. There must be hundreds of thousands of schools.

    And yet, it seems like every single such institutions initially tries a specifically developed system.

    You must have never attempted to deploy a typical, enterprisey off-the-shelf solution for the "education" market. The deployment itself is likely going to cost way more than $10k it'd have cost them to get a bare-bone, simple solution to their problems. And you may end up with geniousness like using PeopleSoft for course enrollment.

    Cheers, Kuba

  • Breck Carter (unregistered)

    A custom application, built from scratch, including database, for ten thousand dollars? Yup, they got what they paid for. Small organizations can be so clueless when it comes to custom software, they need to be protected from themselves.

  • Breck Carter (unregistered) in reply to Kuba

    You're right, of course... the other end of the spectrum is Accenture spending your entire budget building PalacesOfGold (tm)... just as idiotic as GarageWare.

  • (cs)

    I hope the next application featured here will have marquees all over the place... so we IE users will take our revenge.

  • Porpus (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!

    It's adorable when you people get mad. I'm not sure if I mean "girls" or "VB" programmers, but in any case it's cute.

  • (cs) in reply to Troy McClure
    Troy McClure:
    real_aardvark:
    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?

    'Cromulent' is always 'perfectly cromulent' because the 'perfect' embiggens the usage. It would be introubulating to debigulate that belovedest phrase - consider it unblowupable.

    -- Troy McClure Star of such films as 'P is for Psycho'

    Do you earn more from starring in such films as 'P is for Psycho" or for being George Bush's speechwriter?
  • (cs) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    nick davis:
    Perhaps the school's willingness to only spend $10k on a system of this magnitude might have created this entire situation?

    I'm almost willing to bet that given expected traffic from an average school system, such an application could be hosted on Google's App Engine for free, so no recurring costs there. As for development expenses, $10k sounds about right for someone who'd factor in having to learn his Python first, so it'd take two months instead of a month of work. For someone who develops web apps in Python everyday, I'd expect that this should take at most a month of work to replace paper in this case, from start to finish (as in goodbyes said and next work engagement started).

    Chuck Norris would simply stare at the requirements, and his Ruby on Rails Fu would create the app before you'd even asked for it.

    Then again, Chuck Norris wouldn't even bother kicking your sorry Python ass for a measly $10,000.

    Addendum (2008-06-27 11:03): PS Alex and Jake: I think we have a new WTF code challenge brewing up here...

  • Anon (unregistered)

    I'm surprised no one's mentioned the fact that this is just the programmer's revenge on the school system.

    Brightly colored buttons? Unusable, insulting, and slow? This isn't a software solution, it's an expression of hate.

    Captcha: Damnum

  • VB.NET Developer (unregistered) in reply to HerrSchmidt

    LOL. I've been a VB developer for 13 years now. Our company, which runs on VB.NET applications that I've DEVELOPED, has just opened its 138th retail location in 5 years, Our IT department consists of only FOUR folks, because the applications run perfectly.

    I now make 3x what I did when I started 5 years ago.

    Yes, HerrSchmidt, your comment is clever and hilarious. I think I'll chuckle about it all the way to the bank.

  • (cs) in reply to VB.NET Developer
    VB.NET Developer:
    LOL. I've been a VB developer for 13 years now. Our company, which runs on VB.NET applications that I've DEVELOPED, has just opened its 138th retail location in 5 years, Our IT department consists of only FOUR folks, because the applications run perfectly.

    I now make 3x what I did when I started 5 years ago.

    Yes, HerrSchmidt, your comment is clever and hilarious. I think I'll chuckle about it all the way to the bank.

    Ah, proof by pig-headedness and random statistics.

    Always the best way to go.

    What was the multiplier between Y-13 and Y-8, btw? Not that I'm interested; I just want the final cigarette card in this particular package.

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    sir_flexalot:
    $10,000 is unbelievably cheap for a software solution that size... no wonder it was a piece of crap.

    I fail to sense your sarcasm :(

    The application in question is probably a kloc or two of Perl/Python, a few page templates, and a very simple database backend.

    I must admit, I was thinking the same. The application in question really doesn't seem that hard. Probably a week or two to do a useful "first go", and then expand on that. A month or two (done properly) and it should be fully functional. $10k doesn't seem that unreasonable, and, not only that, but if it was done well, other schools might want it as well, so then that would be almost pure profit.

    I mean, 'InterPresence' would be a few hundred lines of PHP/Python AT MOST. InterPunish about the same, InterLunch a bit more (but not much). InterGrades would be the most complex, but even that wouldn't be more than a thousand lines of code.

    Send me $10k and I'll do it for you...

  • (cs) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Kuba:
    sir_flexalot:
    $10,000 is unbelievably cheap for a software solution that size... no wonder it was a piece of crap.

    I fail to sense your sarcasm :(

    The application in question is probably a kloc or two of Perl/Python, a few page templates, and a very simple database backend.

    I must admit, I was thinking the same. The application in question really doesn't seem that hard. Probably a week or two to do a useful "first go", and then expand on that. A month or two (done properly) and it should be fully functional. $10k doesn't seem that unreasonable, and, not only that, but if it was done well, other schools might want it as well, so then that would be almost pure profit.

    I mean, 'InterPresence' would be a few hundred lines of PHP/Python AT MOST. InterPunish about the same, InterLunch a bit more (but not much). InterGrades would be the most complex, but even that wouldn't be more than a thousand lines of code.

    Send me $10k and I'll do it for you...

    Ahhh ... I love the smell of a fixed-price contract in the morning. It smells of ...

    Well, vaseline, if you want my honest opinion.

    $10,000 for this is perfectly reasonable, but you'd have to be somebody like me (or kuba, or you to do it.

    It's an easy job, but it involves a bit of legalese. Bring in a boiler-plate contract; concentrate on the thing they actually want (ie a database that monitors grades), and add more as it goes along, at a given rate.

    The key here is that you schmooze with the other education authorities. $10,000 is for the first job -- which is pretty damn easy, and can be QAed , to answer an earlier poster, by the users.

    Half-way through, you ask your mother for another $10,000 on loan to help you complete it.

    Then you sell it on to another five or ten schools, with appropriate modifications (I'd say that $2,000 for a new CSS script should be sufficient), and there you go. Time to pay Mom back again and concentrate on moving in to the next idiotic state education authority that thinks this is a good idea.

    I mean, given the riginal requirements: yes, you could do this in any scripting language with any back-end whatsoever. Probably including VB and Access, given enough care of the sort that VB and Access programmers tend not to put into their work; but so what?

    This is profit, profit, profit.

    Also, fucked up by an imbecile.

  • sep332 (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    This article was like a massive traffic accident. Started with a head-on collision at 100mph. Then a 20 car-pile up. Then the truck carrying jet fuel jackknifes into the mayhem seconds before the high speed train smashes into the ensuing firestorm. Then the 747 appears on the horizon...

    "His eye twitches involuntarily..."

    (bonus if you know where that's from)

  • Farmer Brown (unregistered) in reply to sep332
    sep332:
    DOA:
    This article was like a massive traffic accident. Started with a head-on collision at 100mph. Then a 20 car-pile up. Then the truck carrying jet fuel jackknifes into the mayhem seconds before the high speed train smashes into the ensuing firestorm. Then the 747 appears on the horizon...

    "His eye twitches involuntarily..."

    (bonus if you know where that's from)

    Can't we play something else?

  • Grant (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    [quote 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 am sorry to burst your delusions of adequacy, but most of the applications that you speak of do qualify for WTF status. The developers making them just don't realize it.

    The emperor has no clothes. He just doesn't know it, and unfortunately, you are the emperor. Someday, you will probably become a talented professional, and then you will look back at this and say, "Oh, yeah, now I see. It was all WTF."

  • GetsTheJobDone (unregistered) in reply to MrsPost

    Senior Database Analyst. Now there's an alleged value enhancing, illusion of competence creating job title!

    I'm jusifiably awestruck...

  • (cs) in reply to Grant
    Grant:
    I am sorry to burst your delusions of adequacy
    I am not sorry to burst yours, dumbass. So it goes with the pointing finger methodology. But don't feel bad; someday, you will probably get a clue, and then you will look back at this and say, "Oh, yeah, now I see. I was TRWTF."
  • (cs) in reply to AMerrickanGirl
    AMerrickanGirl:
    <Why are they using VB if they are "talented professionals"? Does their talent end on the <b>Basic level?>

    So no programmer should agree to help a small business develop a database using Access and VBA if that's all they can afford? Or create some small apps for a department in a large company that can't get approval or funding for the IT department to build a more robust application?

    There's a market for these databases. Somebody has to build them. Not every programmer wants to be a tech wizard.

    But they want to be professionals. I see...

  • OBloodyhell (unregistered)

    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 concur. Visual Staff Scheduler is a simple, easy to use, and virtually owns the market for variable shift scheduling work (i.e., nurses, cops, emergency crews, etc.)

    It's written in VB.

    .

  • Mr Anderson (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    I'd agree. VB is just a development tool, albeit rather more simplistic than, say, C++ or Java. Good developers should be able to work in any tool to deliver a working system.

    The real WTF's here are spending 10K on a system that wasn't checked or tested until deployment, accepting a major system from a single developer, not having any development iterations and so on.

    In any system I've worked on, delivery was the START of the real work not the end of it. That's when the misunderstandings, glitches, teething problems, irritations and general moaning gets worked out.

    As for the comment 'found a contractor', words fail me. You mean with no back up from a reputable company or well founded software community? Some people ask to be kicked.

  • tobias (unregistered)

    why are such contrived and obviously imaginary story published?

  • (cs) in reply to tobias
    tobias:
    why are such contrived and obviously imaginary stories published?
    For the benefit of contrived and obviously imaginary readers.

    BTW, FTFY.

  • (cs)

    And just 'cause it's sooooo much fun playing devil's advocate: Access can actually be a useful solution, as hard as that may be to believe.

    The ability to move/update/backup the entire database with a single .mdb file is very attractive for small, single user situations or even lightly networked. Performance is more than adequate for smaller applications with proper indexing. Basic reports can be generated quickly and easily as well.

    If it's already a MS shop and they have it licensed and sitting around, it actually has its uses.

  • (cs) 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

    Don't worry, Australia has the most obese inhabitants per capita in the world. They also have one of the highest rates of binge drinking, but have the second longest average lifespans (teh Japanese are No. 1). So obviously the mistake is that they are not serving beer, because then the students would be so much more healthy.

  • Ger (unregistered)

    So, they have paid $10.000 for a whole school-management suite, and they got some wtf-code? This is not very strange...

    $10.000 is like a month's worth of software developers work, or even less. One developer, that is. To get such thing working, tested, tweaked etc., you need at least 5 to 10 times more money...

  • Paul (unregistered) in reply to Ger
    Ger:
    So, they have paid $10.000 for a whole school-management suite, and they got some wtf-code? This is not very strange...

    $10.000 is like a month's worth of software developers work, or even less. One developer, that is. To get such thing working, tested, tweaked etc., you need at least 5 to 10 times more money...

    Have you actually read the spec?

    90+% of it is essentially a few database tables, with a basic GUI to add/view (and possibly edit) rows. That's it. Really.

    I mean how hard is it to have a table with 4 columns, <student name/number>, <date>, <attendance code>, <reason> That's essentially 'InterPresence'. Then a couple of SELECTS to do reports.

    Yes, you could make it enterprisey, by adding XML, 5 different programming languages, etc if you want it to take longer than a day to write, test and deploy, but I think the school would have been content without that, at least for a 'first draft'.

    If a decent developer had done this, they could easily have written, tested & deployed the whole system in a few weeks (based on the developer's favourite web technology, as it's a network system). Then, I'm sure, the school could have been persuaded to pay extra for new features, as long as the basics worked.

    It's not a 'complete school management system'. Kids can't get work online. It doesn't work out timetables. It doesn't handle resource booking etc. It's just a set of 5 or 6 database tables with a basic GUI on them and some simple queries

    (BTW, I bet for 'InterGrades', the programmer thought that you'd calculate averages by multiplying all the grades together (ie 95% and 95% makes an average of 90.25%, not 95%))

  • (cs) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    Well, you're right and you're wrong. While it's true that a crappy developer will make crappy stuff no matter what tool they are working with, not all platforms are created equal. VB is both horribly designed and bug ridden.

    I supported myself through my masters degree doing maintenance on VB code (also primarily access stuff) for Reuters finance. VB is just poorly suited to doing anything of any kind of complexity. I'd say I spent about 10 percent of my time developing new code and features, with the other time divided evenly between creating workarounds for the bugs in the VB implementation itself, and repairing bugs that stemmed from the poor organization of the code -> which in itself stemmed from VB's poor design.

    Instead of coming up with clever interfaces and consistent implementations, VB is just a collection of kludges. Since VB is so poorly designed it's virtually impossible to create a VB application of any complexity with a good design.

    VB is a perfect tool if you want to whip out a quick macro. If you are writing something that will take more than a page or two of code, you're better off switching to a different app.

    Nowadays I am again developing for a bunch of finance guys. I convinced them to let me use Python instead of VB, and it's working out much better. When I need to do something computationally intensive it's easy to integrate a c++ routine, and it's no harder to integrate the python stuff into MS's apps than it would be to do so with Vb.

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Paul
    Paul:
    Ger:
    So, they have paid $10.000 for a whole school-management suite, and they got some wtf-code? This is not very strange...

    $10.000 is like a month's worth of software developers work, or even less. One developer, that is. To get such thing working, tested, tweaked etc., you need at least 5 to 10 times more money...

    Have you actually read the spec?

    90+% of it is essentially a few database tables, with a basic GUI to add/view (and possibly edit) rows. That's it. Really.

    I mean how hard is it to have a table with 4 columns, <student name/number>, <date>, <attendance code>, <reason> That's essentially 'InterPresence'. Then a couple of SELECTS to do reports.

    Yes, you could make it enterprisey, by adding XML, 5 different programming languages, etc if you want it to take longer than a day to write, test and deploy, but I think the school would have been content without that, at least for a 'first draft'.

    If a decent developer had done this, they could easily have written, tested & deployed the whole system in a few weeks (based on the developer's favourite web technology, as it's a network system). Then, I'm sure, the school could have been persuaded to pay extra for new features, as long as the basics worked.

    It's not a 'complete school management system'. Kids can't get work online. It doesn't work out timetables. It doesn't handle resource booking etc. It's just a set of 5 or 6 database tables with a basic GUI on them and some simple queries

    Finally, someone who thinks straight.

    Given how things are today (vs. when this "solution" was being developed), it could be set up, quite literally, for nearly zero cost of ongoing maintenance and operation. Let's say it'd run on Google's AppEngine. Even if the school would break the barrier of freedom, er, free service level, then I can't really imagine they'd pay more than say $10/month to Google. The guy who developed it would only need to upgrade it to keep pace with Google's upgrading of their platform, and that'd perhaps be a small job once in 2-3 years.

    As for doing the "teaser" version first for $10k and then expanding and spiffing it up on additional contracts, and peddling it to other schools: sure, that's how you make money. I don't even think you'd need a family loan (re: the mom loan suggestion), most of us should have access to cheap credit here in the U.S. I'm sure most of you could get a 0% credit card for 12 months or so. I always do ;)

  • Mitur Binesderty (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    Well said AMerrickanGirl. I've found that the people that complain about VB instead of just complaining about bad programming are usually just the other side of that bad programming coin.

    If we want to stereo-type then lets say C++ programmers have no concept of clean coding, useful comments, intelligent variable naming, or even basic logic flow. All C++ programmers write horrible spaghetti code on purpose for job security. All C++ programmers hate kittens and love scat films. All C++ programmers sleep with their mothers and shoot underage gay porn while at work using video equipment stolen from poor girl scouts. All C++ programmers are the spawn of the Devil and not in a good way. All C++ programmers have bad breath, acne, dandruff, and are at least 50lbs over weight. C++ programmers cut in line at the grocery store and buy 27 items in the 10 items or less line.

    Can we stop with the stereo-types now?

  • Matt (unregistered) in reply to jtwine

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

    Doing a gradient in VB would require an owner-draw window, probably beyond the capability of someone who is clearly so inept. Well I guess he could have created a bitmap.

    VB was fine but the learning curve should have been made steeper.

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