Re: [Hampshire] Whatever happened to programming?

--- On Sun, 7/3/10, john lewis <johnlewis@???> wrote:

> On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 10:45:29 +0000
> Samuel Penn <sam@???>
> wrote:
>
> > Many programmers are business people who know how to
> write VB
> > macros in Excel, who end up being told to turn their
> spreadsheet
> > into a business critical application.
>
> Done that with SuperCalc.
>
I'm a business person and I never use spreadsheets or VB :-)

When I started programming for hard currency (only a few years ago), I really thought I wasn't quite skilled enough, what with being fairly
thick and all.

From the very first project I was horrified at how poor the code I was assigned to work some 'improvements' on.

30,000 lines of ASP (about 29,800 lines of cut + paste jscript cobbled together by someone who clearly was not really a programmer.

This was for a major international hotel and the original budget was some 5 figure number that the author of said roflware no doubt enjoyed spending.

Sadly, we live in a world where too many people's mental picture of installing software consists of a 'next' button and the need for more cpu cycles so that delay between 'next' is shorter, sort of.

Isaac.