Heres a great idea write a frontend that u can type a human request in then pass that to chatgpt to generate an appropriate sql query then automatically send it. What could possibly go wrong.
That’s not an unreasonable request unless the manager is a dumb asshole and doesn’t understand that such request can take more than one day and other tasks will suffer because of it. Done it dozens of times by request of my immediate manager.
Used to drag the zip file into the network drive, unpack it into the www folder (IIS restart triggered by a chance to the web.config file), and then used Beyond Compare to sync the changes across to the other server.
This interface is laughably terrible. For one, everything should be tabs: you should drag files from one tab to another completely blind. For another, I can see the scrollbars which is just bad. Further, there should be a giant ad at the header/footer which shills bitcoin. Finally, the password field shouldn’t be obscured but synced to our online Safe™ for easy retrieval at just 12.99 a month.
We’ve sure come a long way since those primitive days…
Database is organized collection of data, so a disk full of porn in different formats from json to mp4 can be a database, as long as it’s organized in some way
At a certain level all data is a pair (some name, blob of bytes). You can concatenate sequences of those pairs into a tar archive and call that a database. To access “the last object” you’d have to seek over the “first” objects. So you can build another set of (some name, blob of bytes) that serves as an index into the first set. You’ll first have to do at least one full pass over that first set, and you’ll need to make space on the books to account for twice as many sets, AND you’ll still have to do some seeking over the “first objects” in the indexing collection, but it all keeps recall times very short!
“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
C is a terrible language, but it’s at least reasonably concise and readable when you need to punish it into doing what you want without crashing.
VBA is clunky for just about everything it does, because it tries to be as readable as SQL but fails miserably. I’ve never found out why all it calls all of my variables dim but it sure doesn’t provide reasonable code.
You don’t get the memory corruption you get when writing C code (though you can make it happen) but it’s just not a very suitable language for just about anything. It tries to take the easiest thing in programming, the syntax, and optimising on making that easy.
The biggest problem with VBA is that it’s abused by office workers that need a real application but can’t and won’t get any time and budget to make or acquire one. You end up with the world’s shittiest code imaginable, written by people who aren’t programmers, driven to desperation. Opening someone else’s VBA code is like opening someone’s browser history, no matter how good your opinion of them is, you’ll find something that’ll make you question your view about them if you scroll long enough.
The “real programmers” that like writing code full of memory corruption and null pointers have a hate boner for everything that tries to make their job easier, probably because they feel like they’re only valued for being able to write code and afraid of being found out. Visual Basic 6 allowed Junior programmers to write applications that worked fine for literal decades in a week, while any “hardcore” developer would’ve taken a month getting the string validation right.
The same senseless hate is also present with PHP, where the arguments against the language usually come down to “I don’t like the syntax” and “this ten year old code base I used it in once was super bad”. VB also has the downside of being slow, although with VB.NET you can write powerful VB applications that perform as well as their C# counterparts.
I tried to go back into VB after learning other languages but I just can’t think of any way in which it’s a better choice than something like C#. The Basic ecosystem Microsoft set up, where you can throw together an application in minutes and it just works, is absolutely amazing, and something I still miss on Windows every day. The language itself, with all of its quirks and stupid syntax structures, I don’t.
One thing I’ll give VB is that it has the most hilarious but sometimes quite practical error handling statement I have ever seen (ON ERROR RESUME NEXT) that will literally ignore any error and just keep on trucking. Whenever I see three levels of methods try/catching each other and passing error objects along at the very end, I long for an ON ERROR RESUME NEXT that would just let me do all of the error handling at the very end.
In case the “dim” comment isn’t a joke, as I recall it’s short for “dimension”, as in you are specifying each variable’s dimension in the computer’s memory. Source: some “intro to programming with vb6” book I read like 15 years ago at this point.
I personally am familiar with 2 organisations with millions of dollars in annual revenue that deploy critical line of business applications like this in 2024
With something like this, how do you handle the period of time while copying? I mean you can’t really leave it running as it wouldn’t be in a consistent state. A “under maintenance” page instead? Copy to a fresh folder and when done tell the webserver to serve the new location?
YOLO: especially with thugs like PHP you only affect one page at a time and with low traffic the odds of a problem is small
Maintenance page: temporarily show a page. Some servers like IIS have this built in. Otherwise it’s a simple update to httpd conf
In a cluster environment, just take the node you’re updating out of rotation, and only update one node at a time.
Copy and switch like you suggested. Can be combined with any of the above and is a smart move if upload is slow or can be interrupted, or it’s cumbersome to restore the old files
I used to be a network engineer and I found farming bloody complicated. You might be very surprised at the breadth of knowledge it takes to successfully farm today.
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