[Gambas-user] Migrating to Gambas

[Bruce]

On 9/6/21 6:04 pm, Christof Thalhofer wrote:
> Am 09.06.21 um 01:58 schrieb Bruce:
> 
>> 3) Start from scratch.
> 
> Why this is the worst idea ever:
> 
> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
> 
> Alles Gute
> 
> Christof Thalhofer
> 

Ouch! That hurt, he is one of my favorite commenters.
But then I got just a little over halfway down the article. "The idea 
that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been 
used. It has been tested."

Oh really? Not to my knowledge. Tested, hah! (And I did spend over 10 
years as a software tester. Let me tell you this little "fact". In that 
time the project budgets were around 50% management, 35% marketing, 14% 
programming, 0.8% thinking and 0.2% testing. I kid you not. I used to 
secure lots of contracts with questions along the lines of "So, you are 
spending $15million on this mission critical project and you want to 
keep the testing budget under $15000? Fairly confident of your future 
career then are you?"


"Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing 
wrong with it"

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Then we had better do nothing then eh, just 
in case something bigger than "lots" wasn't "found" and didn't get 
"fixed". "There's nothing wrong with it" is a line Typhoid Mary used at 
her trial.

"It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au 
contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that 
rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s 
kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?"

Oh really? Then we had better do nothing then.

In short, I guess GWBasic is what we should all be using then. I mean 
there was a not bad game of "Pong" around.

So I will repeat the question, why is this industry so psychologically 
dependent on trying to turn something that does not work into something 
else that probably wont work because they insist on re-using poorly 
engineered code with myriads of known and yet to be discovered faults 
that has been hacked at by a large farmyard full of script chickens 
until a commercial decision is taken along the lines of "Hey you, yes 
you, the IT guy in the corridor there! I want you to take all this COBOL 
code and turn it into this new-fangled Y2K stuff I have been hearing 
about from all the other equally incompetent middle managers here. You 
have two weeks and a budget that includes 2 new pencils. Also, don't 
bother testing it because Y2K happened 22 years ago. Can't spend too 
much time discussing it further because I'm off to lunch with the MD."

Hmmm. Perhaps I just answered my own question. Someone once said "Those 
who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it". (It wasn't Henry 
Ford by the way.)

Anyway, cheers.
b

p.s. Why did Benoit write Gambas in the first place? Why didn't he just, 
ahem, "migrate" VB to Linux?  Hmmmmmmm .......................