[Gambas-user] Migrating to Gambas

[Christof Thalhofer]

Am 09.06.21 um 14:17 schrieb Bruce:

> 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 ...

Nice story, but: If one has *reliable working code* in *discontinued
VB6* there is no reason to rewrite it from scratch instead of migrating
it to Gambas and be as carefully as possible to keep the old work.

For example: I have a large method which creates invoices automatically
based on some data in the database. It started as a couple of macros in
Microsoft Works(!), then was migrated to MS Access. In the first ten
years it crashed a lot:

New client with shipping address: Crash.
New client with shipping address not in Germany: Crash.
New foreign customer with shipping address in Germany: Crash.
New client with "&" in it's name: Crash.
New foreign client with a company and special tax circumstances: Crash.

And so on and so forth...

After about ten years, we had grazed the vast pasture of crash
possibilities, the method has worked smoothly ever since and now it
contains lots of fine distinctions (that might look a little twisted if
you don't analyze exactly what they do).

If anything, I only touch it very carefully with tweezers. I'd be crazy
to throw it away and develop it new from scratch!

This is what Joel Spolsky is talking about. When he says that the code
is "tested", he means that it has been tested on the reality.

Alles Gute

Christof Thalhofer

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