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You are wrong. VB is the problem. It was always sold as sooooo easy to learn and use and then remained the safe harbor for all the horror coders they had picked up. A kind of Jurassic Park for coders.
Give a user a program and he can work for a day. Show the user how to program and you have work for the rest of your life.
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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CDP1802 wrote: Give a user a program and he can work for a day. Show the user how to program and you have work for the rest of your life.
Love that one 
'As programmers go, I'm fairly social. Which still means I'm a borderline sociopath by normal standards.' Jeff Atwood
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
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But please don't get me wrong. I have met people who taught themselves and also were very capable of logical thinking. Once a mailman (who only had some experience on a C64) told me about the bugs in a Win32 program, where to look in the code and how to fix them. And then there is that great mass of users who think they know everything...
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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Yup, I've got some mixed experiences too: on the one hand self-taught guy who did great complicated stuff, like expert systems, AI, etc... and on the other hand supposedly 'educated' engineers who couldn't tell a variable from an instruction.
And users, ah users, ...
'As programmers go, I'm fairly social. Which still means I'm a borderline sociopath by normal standards.' Jeff Atwood
'I'm French! Why do you think I've got this outrrrrageous accent?' Monty Python and the Holy Grail
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Quote: You are wrong. VB is the problem.
I'm afraid not. Go ahead and open your mouth and insert your shoe. In this case it is a combination of ignorance and arrogance that is the problem (something that you also seem to be displaying by this comment). Since you know so much about the culture of my workplace, why don't you expound upon that?
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Sasha Laurel wrote: Go ahead and open your mouth and insert your shoe
No, thank you. But I would like to test Newton's third law. How would you like it? Shall I take that shoe and let it collide with your rear side or shall I just keep writing?
What I did say was, that VB was always advertised as 'easy to learn' and 'ideal for beginners'. If I may translate that: If you are too lazy to learn or too dumb for anything else, then use VB. What I did not say was that all people who use VB are of that kind.
Anyway, what you call arrogance is what I call self defense. I do not think that I can stop an army of the lazy and the dumb from doing vtheir evil, and therefore I do not preach. What I do is to stay away from them and not allow them to drag me into their desasters. It's remarkable how often things turned ugly when I did not manage to avoid VB.
Indeed I just have to look into source control, my bosses' chamber of horrors, to find 10+ years of madness. It was of course the bosses' pointy-hairedness that got them into this in the first place. It took some years for them to realize that it might help if they hire developers that actually learned their job. It's amazing how many of those failures were written in VB, or perfectly good projects converted to VB and then mercilessly butchered. Or former VB 'developers' who had turned 'professional' and looked for new places to commit the same old sins. The only projects that showed a better quality were programmed in C++, which does not have the reputation to be 'easy to learn' or 'ideal for beginners'. What a coincidence.
Sasha Laurel wrote: Since you know so much about the culture of my workplace, why don't you expound
upon that?
For your sake, I hope that this is the culture of your workspace. For my part, I prefer to be called ignorant and arrogant before voluntarily getting myself into such a mess. At least that helped me to get together a longer list of projects that did not fail, which I can arrogantly point to. The irony is , that VB has evolved to a point where it had become usable, but less so its greatest users and supporters.
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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Quote: Shall I take that shoe and let it collide with your rear side
The "foot in mouth" thing is figurative, but since you seem to be speaking literally, I would hate to deprive you of the opportunity. I live in Salt Lake City, UT near Liberty Park. We can meet at that park at any time of your choosing where we can test Newton's third law to your hearts content.
As long as we can agree that you've conceded your point that "VB is the problem" by saying that the real problem is the devs who never get past it, then I don't think we are in disagreement at all. As a side note, you can attack VB6 and prior all you want, I don't even care if you make silly blanket statements about those versions.
Quote: For your sake, I hope that this is the culture of your workspace.
In my defense, I didn't really have any better options at the time. I would prefer to work in an environment that "separates the men from the boys" so to speak, but for now, that will just have to wait. Even still, we have plenty of very successful products, all written in some form of VB (mostly .Net).
You come across as very angry and mean, so if I offended you please accept my apologies. I'll rescind my comment about you being ignorant and arrogant, as long as it is fully obvious that you are neither.
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You are right. Time to stop. It's been 32 years since I have been in Salt Lake City and if I hop into a plane to fly half way around the world, then I would hopefully come up with a better reason. And no, you did not offend me. When somebody has a problem, he can come right in. Then we close the door and we will never lose a word again about anything that will be said in the next ten minutes. It may be unfair and certainly impolite, but that does not matter. With those things out of the way it's usually no big deal anymore to figure out what to do.
Sasha Laurel wrote: As long as we can agree that you've conceded your point that "VB is the problem"
by saying that the real problem is the devs who never get past it, then I don't
think we are in disagreement at all.
Ok, lets agree on that.
Sasha Laurel wrote: As a side note, you can attack VB6 and prior all you want, I don't even care if
you make silly blanket statements about those versions.
No need for that. I don't like to make a religion out of my work and don't want to participate in any holy war over it.
Sasha Laurel wrote: You come across as very angry and mean
Angry, yes, but not at you. I did not really notice that I had built up so much steam, but now I'm back on my way to change this.
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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Cheers mate. If you ever do make it out here I'll buy you a beer (or OJ, or a cuppa-tea, whatever) We can test Newton's 3rd while we clink the glasses.
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Or you come here[^]. We have the right kind of glas for that
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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CDP1802 wrote: You are wrong. VB PHP is the problem
FTFY 
On a more serious note, I don't think any language is the problem. The problem is the people using them...
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PHP? That's Triassic Park!
Every language may have a share of bad coders, but some have been advertised to them as being especially 'easy to learn'. They were called and they came. The languages may have evolved over time, but many of the coders have not.
At least artificial intelligence already is superior to natural stupidity
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Just fix your stored procedures so they don't return nulls.
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That's a great idea. Now if only I had the access to do that...
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Sasha Laurel wrote: That's a great idea. Now if only I had the access to do that...
In this case, yes, suicide is a very tempting alternative.
Homicide, on the other hand, mmm...  ...sweet
I've found a nice way to punish the original coders when I come across stuff like this. Ask them what they intended to do in that portion(s) of the code, and WHY they did it so. It's not offensive, and it's perfectly justifiable.
Now, one of two things may happen:
- You, made to look like a fool if they can come up with a good explanation why they did what they did (which is ok with me, 'cause at least I can understand, and I don't mind admitting sometimes I'm just plain dumb), or
- The 'WTF-did-I-do-here-can't-remember-can't-justify look on their faces, which is purely priceless (it may not help in untangling that code, but my ego will feel a really nice tickle-tingle)
Now, in your specific case, I have no idea what would help, short of modifying the whole codebase 
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This is probably actually Microsoft's fault: a Linq query should work the same for a query against the database, or a query against an in-memory object that was created by evaluating a Linq query on that same database.
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Interesting idea! I wonder what the implications would be for an IQueryable provider.
Oh well, I'm mostly just wanting to piss and moan at the moment.. 
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Sasha Laurel wrote: Any suggestions? Is suicide a viable alternative to fixing thousands of lines of VB Linq statements of this nature?
No, just consider it job security 
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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Job Security! Just the positive spin that I needed. Thank you sir!
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Sasha, you might have to keep reminding higher up management that it will take time to eventually get it all taken care of if they start playing whiny games about it taking time.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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The problem with Job Security is: There isn't a reliable method found, that does so. (At least any that I know of.)
Just ask the tons of unemployed programmers who wrote unreadable code to get it.
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If you want job security, be an ninja. You can pretend you were nowhere near any bad incidents or right in the middle of good ones.
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Sasha Laurel wrote: Is suicide a viable alternative to fixing thousands of lines of VB Linq statements of this nature?
Depends on what you call viable. If you want to get out of this problem as quickly as possible, no matter the cost, then yes. Personally, I'd say the cost is too high to consider it.  (That's disregarding the subsequent funeral costs you'll impose on someone else.)
PS your quote had really weird markups that I haven't seen code project do before. I stripped the verbose "span" markup surrounding every lower-case "i" in your note.
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You make me realize that I sound extremely insensitive to people you who really are suicidal. OOPS! No offense intended.
As for the weird markup, my company targets IE as our main browser, so a lot of the time I'm in IE tab for chrome. I wonder if it has something to do with that?
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Sasha Laurel wrote: you really are suicidal
That threw me for a bit. What did I say to make you think I was suicidal? Then because of context I realized "you" should have been "who". 
Today I'm following a bug, no real detail on how to get there so I "best guess" it.
This it a multiple pull-down app. Pick something at random. Code blows up, try-catch retrieves the error. Tried to retrieve a value from a nullable datetime field. Threw the error because the field was null. Looks like 94% of the choices leads to that. Start a SQL trace, it goes there when it starts up, but doesn't when I make my pick and blows up.
So the code should be able to know what it can allow and modify the pull-downs to match. It's doing it elsewhere in the same pull-downs. Just one more area where the code isn't helpful. (Especially when I'm fairly new and don't really know what is meant by "2012-01-23-D2302-Private-Repro-Attempt-7-v-brleon")
OK, it's dated, by a specific person, created while looking into something. But what's really important is that I've picked a type of report that should have allowed me to pick 26 of the 428 selections that should work. That or replace the null date with today's date in the other 400 possibles.
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