There's Kexi, IIRC. Not sure it's a serious competitor. Alpha 5 probably comes closer but my biggest problem is that if you're looking at those, you're basically going to end up using Visual Studio.
Which is why Alpha 5 and its kind are fundamentally useless. Those non-programmers won't have access (pun intended) to those applications and can't install it
Access, being a part of Office, means anyone can just start building some simple forms and let it grow organically (for better or worse) until it becomes a LoB and thus needs to be managed.
@Comintern Many people learned Visual Basic years ago and don't want to spend time learning C#, which is far less convenient for computer illiterate people
@Comintern IIRC you have to deal with lot of components like datatable, dataadapter, etc., etc. The nonprogrammers only need to write a SQL query (using visual designer ugh) and they're done.
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I had a VB6 gig a few years ago. a doors & windows manufacturer. they didn't care for "proper, clean code" - as long as it works, it's "good enough". "we make windows, not software". yet that shitty blob of fugly code (an add-in for the ERP system) was responsible for everything from pricing & promotions to reporting. Writing clean code was wasted time, refactoring was forbidden, the technical debt was astronomical.
I'd do the same if C# allowed non programmers to easily add stuff to views and queries, and WPF/Forms was user friendly (and provided a proper "Dynamic Table" view that doesn't require a million lines of code)
Having a A4 spreadsheet as the background, and Access fields over some of the "cells" so that users feel like they are filling the document, but they actually fill an Access table
That's exactly where the "paper form mentality" becomes a obstacle. They can't distinguish between the action of data entry and the action of reporting on it.
Unless I can guess where they will annotate stuff, OCR can hardly understand what data the client wants to be changed
I wish we would have standardized data in a proper format to begin with, not scanned sheets of paper with red text written with a pen all over the sheet
@Elcan Honest question. Is RD that difficult to understand? I've been cutting my teeth on C# with RD and while there's been a learning curve and frustration, it's not insurmountable.
Or are you referring to a specific issue? I'm still catching up on chat.
Partially because I don't know the requirements (resolver), and partially because it's just so blooming complicated with so many moving parts (resolver).
Hell, sometimes I find myself thing "WTF am I doing here" when I'm writing it for the first time. Or "WTH kind of stupid corner did I get myself into here".
@Elcan That fills me with :sad:. I strive to put myself out of a job by automating.
In your opinion is it better: 1) Take to completion the initial plan. Then go back and refactor what you just finished. 2) Mid-flight start refactoring and combine them.
1 - strikes me as an atomic mindset of fully doing something, even when you know it'll get erased right away.
We work for a big factory, and each unit has a different way of being programmed
So each time we work for a new unit, we develop tools to work faster for that unit. The "programs" aren't text based. They are function blocks with parameters, some programs can go up to 200 parameters. We spend lots of time automating the import/export processes, but in the end it saves us days of work
I spent 2 weeks writing a tool that allows us to work from the export files (that use a JSON like format, but not JSON so I had to write my own parser). This stuff still saves us time today because we don't need to import data to use it
Good question, luckily we replaced one of the oldest units a few months ago. Went from pneumatic panels manually tuned to a full distributed control system.
The plant's company didn't tell us how much it improved, but we know it was very successful
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