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by passivate 1952 days ago
>the language has enough quirks and shortcomings that it forces you to take long detours to accomplish what would be very simple tasks in more modern languages

Any examples that you've come across?

1 comments

I've already mentioned VBA classes. If you want to read , just read through Chip Pearsons' great Arrays library. 30 functions just to do what you should be able to do natively in a high-level scripting language such as VBA

http://www.cpearson.com/Excel/VBAArrays.htm

Imagine how painful your experience would be writing any decently complex reusable code in VBA without knowing about all of the edge cases covered by Chip in that module

Oh, I was mainly interested in your view to kick off a conversation. I wasn't sure what you meant by long detours. I don't program in VBA, so I was interested. From the outside, it seems like a powerful language for non-programmers to implement business logic.
Sorry, didn't mean to sound rude at all. I guess I was a bit on the defensive given all the pushback I was getting elsethread

It's hard to really pin it down to a couple of things, but after spending some time in it, you quickly feel the ergonomics aren't really great. It's just a lot of typing to get basic things done like inserting an element into a 1-d array.

For such a high-level language and one directed at non-programmers as you mentioned, you'd think that sort of tooling would be available natively

Its all good. I used to be a dev many years ago, so I just try to stay informed as much as possible now.