Re:Learn C programming and the rest will come
by meredydd on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @11:11AM
(#15807889)
The trick is to benchmark that "crap software", not against the architectural marvel you would build, but against the Byzantine Excel spreadsheet (or worse, binder of paper forms) that would have been used otherwise.
Nowhere is "worse is better" more true than line-of-business software.
Completely agree. If this weren't true, the fizzbuzz test wouldn't exist.
The 90s were filled with businessmen creating Access databases that wouldn't scale, and Visual Basic's drag-and-drop capabilities created a cottage industry for controls consumed by non-programmers.
That's both good and bad. Bad for the obvious reasons (lots of crap software) but good in that for the most part people were able to build what they needed to solve problems and move on.