[RANTISH] Programming Stupidity

Wonderful quote from my boss, who's (supposed to be a professional programmer for Caterpillar): "You should use strings instead of integers. You can put bigger numbers in a string." [Large progressive rant here, nevermind me...] This came up while I was being forced to write a Visual Basic program. You see, he saw me playing with BASIC on one of the UNIXen, and he thinks "BASIC = Visual Basic!". It doesn't. Visual basic is almost entirely worse. You guys think BASIC is bad? How about BASIC that automagically writes bad Windows code for you! This thing couldn't make optimized code if Billy-boy's monopoly depended on it. On top of that, the bad code that it DOES generate doesn't even work. We build the .EXE on a Win98 machine - Now it refusues to run on 95. Microsoft's wizard for making install programs for your software sucks worse. It replaced some DLLs it wasn't supposed to have on our (one and only, thank Goddess!) NT server, and NT crashed like you wouldn't believe. I'm gonna have a hell of a time putting THAT back together... On top of this, the installer doesn't run under 95, either. It starts just fine, makes a pathetic attempt at copying files, then blows up horrbibly with Error 0x16E. Wasn't Billy saying they were supposed to make our error messages make SENSE? With an error message like that, a dialog box reading "YOU LOSE!" would be better. Not to mention a damn sight funnier. We're going to reformat one of our 95 boxen and start from a clean machine - My bet is the installer will find some way to do nasty things to the partition table. The sad part is, this has become the status quo. And I hate it. I can't stand it. This is progress? If progress is like evolution, I'd sure like to jump back in time and see what we came from, it's probably a lot better than the here-and-now... Another quote from my boss: "In programming, it doesn't matter how well it runs or does it's job. The bottom line is, 'can we sell it to someone?'" Is it just me, or is that just plain wrong? Please say it's not only me... I hate being alone, 'cause that means I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Sorry for that, I just needed to vent. Do with it what you will... -------