ProgrammerHumor
ohGodWhy
Discussion
"Do you know VBA ?"
I prefer to stay homeless.
>! This is a joke people, asking people to use VBA is clearly not allowed by the Geneva convention !<
How about VB.net?
I helped a lady in accounting a bit ago with an excel spreadsheet vba. Document came from japan, about 700 lines of vba. all the comments were in Japanese and the variable names were romanticized spelling of Japanese words, i had to open the file in vscode where i could change the encoding so that the Japanese characters showed correctly and then google translated all the comments. After that i actually had to track down the users issue. It was driven by another worksheet that the user would select in an explorer browser. 2 days of debugging later i figured out the issue was user error for not properly formatting the second spreadsheet.
This would be my 13th reason
User error lol. My first and last possibility of where the error came from to begin with.
I bet cursor could figure it out
Back in ~2002 I wrote some VBA testing software (to pick multiple choice questions randomly depending on category) and ended up designing a whole “application” around Access as a summer project for testing some nuclear reactor operators.
Bow before me. LOL.
When i was in engineering school the first language they taught us was VBA. Not because we'd ever need that, but because the teacher knew that particular language. In the first 3 of 5 years we did less C++ than we did in the 4th grade of middle school
Lol fine by me if it pays well. Better than executives pushing random tech buzzwords they heard in some conference. Rewriting our entire codebase every 5 months with whatever the latest flavor of the week is.
Pfffft, you wouldn’t be rewriting your entire codebase . . . THAT’S WHY WE HAVE COPILOT!
I started programming access databases … in the 90s.
Thats how I started too! They were using excel sheets on shared drives, but were running into issues where the file was locked, and we used MS Access to many people (3-4 people) could make changes at the same time.
How does it work? Aren't there primary key conflicts when many people are adding a new record to this same table?
Same way it works on mysql, postsql, ms-sql. I would be lying if I told you I really understood it, but basically it's just transaction locking and auto incrementing keys are kinda magic lol
Isn't that how we all started?
I started on an extremely legacy VB.NET app that had been more or less generated through Visual Studio with some OG vibe coding (no AI, though- circa 2005) by one guy in college that, with me on the team, was up to three people trying to make it do something sensible.
So, no Access DB, but still a rough ride.
If you want high paying job security, learn some old language or framework. You wouldn’t believe all the systems still running on old obscure languages, too big to replace and not enough skilled programmers to maintain
Do you mean php?
Yup, can confirm as a sysdev working for a major bank. I maintain code that's older than I am.
Literally my job lol
It's not that bad. My first paying gig was in 99 doing VB + Access DB stuff.
My condolences.
I hope that your life is better now
I tested a system in VB6 + Access in 2008. Is still sold today to small companies.
I work for a very large company. We have VB .Net stuff that is still in prod today.
VB.Net is miles better than VB 6.
Ya, it is. It's still hilarious to see a company with over $1B a year in revenue using it in prod.
Sometimes job is job... and thats enough
Tbf that's how a lot of the current software workforce got their starts as well
That will be me soon! Hooray 🥳
Yay! Wish you this honor to code some Microsoft Access
A long time ago I did a contract for a bank that involved wiring up an external application to an Excel spreadsheet through DDE and a pile of VBA.
That (and many other, similar) experiences lead to Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering: no matter what the users asked for, what they really wanted was Excel.
Like we didn't do this 20 years ago. My first job was programming a Windows GUI in SQL.
Now get off my lawn.
And it begins the sacred rite of DoCmd.OpenForm and crying into Excel sheets. We don’t choose the mission, Access chooses us.
VBA was good for getting my foot in the door, but man doing excel scripting made me feel like I was going backwards
Omg… I am the hiring manager in this picture 🥲
As it was 25 years ago, too
Could be worse... could be some businesses proprietary language. Long long time ago used to work for Disney who had a Java scripting language that essentially predated Groovy... was on a team to thankfully migrate away from that but we still had to sustain those apps until the switch could occur.
Banks used to be pretty notorious for this as well... was about to get swept up soon after graduating by a bank with their custom DSL they used for building their financial applications.
The early post .com era of web development was "interesting" times; about all I can say.
I'd rather go and work in a coal mine than go back to working on VBA and Access projects
At least it's not Sharepoint!
Holy cow! Lol
Get in, loser - we're maintaining ActiveX in VB6
Fast paced, dynamic environment with a cutting edge development department
looks inside:
Java 6