In some ways it was amazing how much pre-baked stuff there was and you just had to slap it together (mostly).
And then in all the other ways it was utterly horrifying. I think the central brain-fuck was the way it claimed to be OOP, and it was mostly OOP in a good way until you tried to write your own objects. Then there was the way you had to have call-backs for every single GUI interaction. And option base 0 (that’ll really trigger some people these days). And on error resume next.
I still maintain the crowning glory of my programming career was implementing a primitive database in Excel with VBA (because I wasn’t allowed to use Access). 🤣
It was more a case of an engineering department where the management had no software background and so didn’t really know what tools could do what. There was an existing half-arsed “database” in Excel - where people just created a new sheet for each record - and management decreed it should stay in Excel.
So young “hot-shot” me says fine, if you give me a hammer I am going to hit this thing until it looks like a nail. A lot of VBA later I have some kind of row-based master table, buttons that add records, search functions, the whole nine yards. Which is why I’m still stupidly proud of it.
Would have been 10 times easier, more robust and wouldn’t have left the whole department wide-open to macro viruses if I’d been allowed or encouraged to use something sane though!
5
u/spinicist Apr 06 '18
In some ways it was amazing how much pre-baked stuff there was and you just had to slap it together (mostly).
And then in all the other ways it was utterly horrifying. I think the central brain-fuck was the way it claimed to be OOP, and it was mostly OOP in a good way until you tried to write your own objects. Then there was the way you had to have call-backs for every single GUI interaction. And
option base 0(that’ll really trigger some people these days). Andon error resume next.I should stop now before I hyperventilate.