The luck has held out so far.
Only a few decades and many million parts.
40,000+ lines of I admit, "shitty" VB code inside. It started before there was VB and I embraced Basic as a good and bad language.
Not as obtuse as assembly, perhaps C better but it is so hard to read .
"Real programmers do in it Hex", I have the tee-shirt.
Some of us still count clock cycles and know the interaction when we write real time code.
The newer MS systems are much improved.
Bob
Ah well. Skip the first fifteen or twenty years of relay, gear-wheel, hollow state both analog & digital, enter with the modern age, 1974 or so:
Twinned HP 3000 Mark III, HP MPE-3000. For lack of any better toolset, 55,000 lines of HP's own version of BASIC.. which was BASIC in name only, and 'sin tax' only mostly.
There was no "goto". There was DO...DOEND. Or a branch to a LABEL that contained a subroutine, and - sort of a COME FROM when it returned.
It was what I had.
BOM explosion, 4,000 SKU capable, the Jewelry Manufacturing Division I headed?
ISAM DB under a BOM so fast off S-100 with slew-rate-tuned 8" FDD that an adapted Data Printer 1064 chain-train needed external buffers. Written in? Ray Duncan's LMI forth.
Atrocious core-hog, too. 13 greedy kilobytes. Mind, 8K was for the text editor and pretty-printer for business correspondence. Forth is like that. The more definitions you have in the vocabulary, the fewer you needed to have to begin with, so it sorta shrinks as it grows?
It was what I had.
Also expanded the programmed learning we used our in-house-developed POS terminals to train-up staff on. Chairman's Son had written the first part of it. In COBOL.
No sweat. COBOL is good people. LOVED the "divisons" and starting out with "environment division" and such.
By WTF, Fred, why an
interactive individualized, network distributed programmed learning system in Mike-Foxtrot
batch-bitch COBOL?.
"It was what I had."
Fast-forward, C&W. Marvelous pan-global fault/trouble-ticket/provisioning/recording toolset. Meet Hugh Mayhew, the developer over a pint, London. Find out he coded the database and all the HMI in...FORTRAN.
"It was what I had"
Now .. guy named Bob sez he did a lot of work in MS VB?
It was what he had?
OYE! Surely there must be LIMITS to this s**t eventually?
If
*I* were to be the one admitting to that instead of you?
My old friends would be suspicious that
"what I had" was probably
tertiary syphilis!
And Real programmers do it first with solder. Then wire-wrap. Where owning more than one color of wire is CHEATING!
To implement better I/O. Called "Octal" thanks!