> This discussion takes many forms and has existed for, well, ever.
> 
> Visual Basic is used on production production and systems 
> very pervasively, and yet many (most?) programmers scoff at 
> it, as though it weren't a real programming language.
> 
> Every tool has its place, and when someone indicates that one 
> tool is universally 'bad' then all I can think is how sad it 
> must be to have such a limited tool set.  Still, you can use 
> a hammer for practically anything, so I suppose they don't 
> see it as a limitation, and it does provide a greater focus for them.


I spend most of my days doing VBA stuff, VB programmers look down on me  :)

It's a nice niche, doing stuff that's 'too hard' for normal people, and 'we
don't do that' from the 'real' programmers.  Stuck between ignorance &
snobbery.

Excel + 'Get External Data' + Autorefresh + PivotTable/PivotChart keeps a
lot of people happy, and it's dead easy to pull stuff off the web or a
database, summarise it in a pretty graph, and have it refresh every few
minutes (aka dashboard apps).  The last guy hadn't finished rambling about
he'd use XML, AJAX and Java and many other letters of the alphabet when I
showed him the finished result.  He hasn't spoken to me since  :)

Plenty of WTFs though.  Eg today - You can do pivots in Access, but to use
VBA on them you need to reference the OWC DLL (Web components).  Office 2003
installs OWC11, but Access 2003 uses OWC10 (the XP version).  Why the hell
does it use the old version?  And you can't manipulate the pivot on the form
unless you load the right DLL, and you can't check pivot version unless the
right DLL is loaded...  And what fat-fingered bastard managed to put a space
char after captions on Outlook windows so the FindWindow API doesn't work?
Gah.

Tony

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