[AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL

Alan,

I submitted a few jobs on punched cards, and programming was NOT much easier
back then.  Each card had fields (as I am sure you will remember) and you
had to make sure you started each piece of the thing in the right column.  I
remember a friend of mine calling Fortran "Basic with all the good stuff
left out".  You submitted your job and when it failed you did it again
fixing just that one thing... Only it was 24 hours later.  You didn't design
applications, you designed little functions.  GoTos to LINE NUMBERS for
crying out loud, instead of functions with strongly typed parameters.

The "good old days" those were NOT.

Yea, things are MUCH more complex today, but you are building MUCH more
powerful applications.  In the "good old days" you called people up on the
telephone to discuss things.  Mucho dinero if they happened to live / work
in New York.  And you didn't even realize that very talented people like
Shamil (living in Russia) even existed, never mind able to teach you stuff
you never knew before.  Now you jump on chat or (gasp) EMAIL them and wait
for a response.  Or even VOIP.

THINK about building an Access application.  Now THINK about building that
back in "the good old days".  A team of programmers, a million dollars in
salary and a million dollars in machine time to build a database that I now
build for a few thousand, by myself, for the little 4 person company down
the road.  And it ran sloooooow as hell, consumed all of the memory, was
tough to maintain, and... Hmm... pretty much sucked.  Assuming of course you
could afford the million bucks for the machine to run it on.

Sorry, but the "good old days" pretty much sucked.

And finally, in the end, programming in VB.Net (or even C#.net I have to
imagine) is not that much more complex than programming in C++ in early
199X.  If you wish to ignore the .net framework you can just "roll your
own".  If you choose to use the .net framework you have at your disposal
thousands of classes for everything from dictionaries, lists and queues
(yes, I wrote a couple of those "back when" and while it was fun, it WASN'T
productive) to sockets for web conversations, and tons of stuff in between.


I purchased all of the toolboxes that Borland published for Turbo Pascal as
TP was going object oriented.  Man I loved it, it was soooo powerful.
Looking back on it now it was like tinker toys.

I am not saying that .net isn't a PITA, it definitely is.  There is a LOT to
learn and a LOT of stuff to discover and figure out, but man it is in a
completely different league from anything I have ever seen before.  The guys
making 800s on their SATs are designing stuff that I can use to make me look
like I scored 700s on mine.  ;-)  

I think that is pretty darned awesome.

John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com 

Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause:
http://folding.stanford.edu/

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Lawhon, Alan C
Contractor/Morgan Research
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 10:39 AM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: Re: [AccessD] The future of Access, .NET and SQL


All this speculation about the future of Access, .NET, SQL, Office (and
Microsoft's "plans" for us ...), makes me think of the lyrics from April
Lavigne's song: "Why'd you have to go and make things so COMPLICATED ???"

I remember a time when we "wrote code" using a thing called an IBM 029
keypunch machine and we submitted "jobs" to an IBM 360 mainframe computer
thru a "card reader" machine.  We came back the next day to see if our "job"
had executed.  Believe it or not, "programming" was MUCH easier back then.

Now, Bill Gates has to keep (or try to keep) his shareholders happy. This
translates into constantly changing software (and "new" technologies with
STEEP learning curves) that never end - just so Mr. Gates can sell more
software and generate more revenue and profits ...

Susan says that she's sick of it and has decided to devote her time to
writing children's books rather than trying to keep up with constantly
changing software.  Here on my job we are facing a monumental task to "web
enable" a major component of a large environmental database.  The Senior
Systems Analyst, fearing a major disaster and a P.O.'d customer, has spent
most of the past year coming up with one reason after another for delaying
the conversion.  (I imagine by the time he runs out of excuses, he will have
found a job elsewhere ...)

I wonder if the thought has ever occurred to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer
that not everyone scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT and
not ALL of us want to spend every available minute of our "spare" time
absorbing all this "new" technology?

Alan "Old Codger" Lawhon