Stupid, Stupid Access

There’s some sort of irony in loosing a couple of days in coding a new system to dealing with fixing the old system that is being replaced by the new system but isn’t yet because you can’t work on the new system because you’re too busy fixing the old system…


Not the delicious “spammer gets his home address posted on the internet” type of irony, more the “oh look, I just cut of my thumb” type of iron.


Stupid Access… what a piece of shit.

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Category: Rants

6 Comments on “Stupid, Stupid Access”

  2. I agree, more than you could ever know!! I propose that anyone who tries to quickly “whip up” a small app in Access be mercilessly and publicly flogged as a warning to all!

  3. Jimson, the problem is not those people that quickly “whip up” applications in Access/VBA. That is its intended purpose and I think it is a GOOD thing.
    The problem is when you “whip up” an application in Access/VBA and then use that patched-together piece of junk in an “enterprise” setting that a business relies upon to carry out its goals.
    A coupla years ago, I worked in a place that had about 20-30 “whipped up” programs that did everything from count inventory to access the central mainframe of a LARGE organization. That was a huge headache…
    But I have used languages like VBA and AppleScript in my OWN use to “whip up” an application and I think it is good to have quick-and-dirty languages so that you don’t have to resort to Perl or Java to do simple things.

  4. Engel: almost right I think. I’d be willing to say that it’s in between, that is, that you can “whip up” something quickly, but then The Powers That Be say something like “oh cool, it’s almost done, so we can have it by the end of the month” and you end up NOT re-writing the app from scratch so that it’s properly achitectured, and not whipped up, but instead turning it into a franken-app because the bosses don’t understand the difference between using RAD tools to give a proof of concept and using RAD tools to create an actual product.
    But tools to allow you to do simple things quickly and powerfully are good (though I personally think perl falls into this category more than VB, but that’s me), but it’s hard to make sure that these don’t get turned into “real” apps with out the appropriate reengineering.

  5. My putrid hatred of computers today has been derived completely from Microsoft Access. ODBC connect this you whore!…. gives finger