I am considering Jumping Ship ...

[ChrisGreaves]

That's dangerous for a programmer!

I beg to disagree

I feel that solid laziness is an essential quality of a designing programmer.
It starts with the mantra "Computers are good at doing boring and repetitive tasks" (so let's program them so we never have to do that again) and wanders through macros (as in assembly-language, REAL macros, not macros-which-are-really-subroutines-without-parameters a la microsoft, and into let's-accumulate-a-library-of-utility functions so that now I have the time to compose fatuous replies to Hans's posts

Of course, having said that, I am in no way endorsing the quality of Rudi's programming and certainly not his typing

[ChrisGreaves]

I have following this string with great interest in being kind of in the same boat (or should that be ship...) as CG.

Boat.
Boats are leaky, ships tend not to be so!

FWIW while you and I have the same thoughts we are in different sorts of boats. My boat has left the shores of paid-work and is now at sea on the "my retirement days are precious to me". I don't want to spend a month each year mastering a new user/developer interface, which is what I feel I have been doing for 25 years with MSoft.
I reason that *IF* I am going to make a change, now is the time; time to leap to a new vessel, spend a heavy month and a few lighter ones mastering the new steering wheel or tiller, and then settle down.

My programming work nowadays is for myself.

You, I gather, have to weigh in the cost in lost revenue, dollars, whereas I am only weighing in the hours.

(Evil/Idle thought: I don't suppose you feel like paying me to learn JavaScript on your behalf ... I could be persuaded if the money is right ...)

[ChrisGreaves]

...MS is in the middle of creating an API to make JavaScript work with the Office object models. Intro article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/librar ... 20082.aspx

“An Office Add-in is a web application hosted in a web browser control or iframe running in the context of an Office host application that can interact with a user's documents or mail items. You can use Office Add-ins to extend and interact with ...”

This is another reason why I’m tired of Msoft – their over-corruption of terminology.

I was dissed when they mis-appropriated the term “macro” to identify a “VBA subroutine without parameters”; I was recognizably unhappy when File Manager morphed through “File Explorer” and “Windows Explorer” and got itself confused with “Internet Explorer”. (“I’ve loaded Explorer and can’t see my C-drive anywhere”)

Now those Office Add-ins that I’ve been creating in VBA since 1997 have to share terminology which is by definition NOT a VBA project in a template (or similar).

For the life of me I can’t understand why Microsoft shovels confusion into the mix whenever it churns out another mega-line of code feature.

Use English and find a new word, for heaven’s sake.

When I say “I’m thinking of jumping ship”, I don’t know for certain that Apple, Linux, or any alternative technology will be any better – for me – than MSoft, but I’m betting that the design team doesn’t set out to confusauser the way MSoft does.

[ChrisGreaves]

An interesting article that fits into this conversation....

“Open source software—software freely shared with the world at large—is an old idea. A guy named Richard Stallman started preaching the gospel in the early ’80s, though he called it free software.”

Actually it is way older than that. In the late 60s we shared everything we learned in programming, at first in University and then between programmers (“I have this neat Autocoder routine that converts base-10 numbers to english words ...”).

I recall in 1981 programming for a firm in Perth, they ran Nova computers with a version of BASIC and they asked me to modify the source code, either for the compiler or for an application program, probably the latter as it involved a sort routime, and |I was stunned; I’d not met a computer supplier who would release software, but there it was in relatively regular Dartmouth BASIC; I modified it and everyone was happy. Clearly before that year Nova (if that was indeed the firm) had made its application source code available to their users and by extension to BASIC programmers on other mainframes.

[CData]

I will clarify my potential ship jump: I like Microsoft - no big org is perfect - and any complaints would exist in other products/code/etc. The ship I am on now is Windows based applications - which are extremely cost effective on a feature/cost ratio...probably nothing better out there (if there is I would be interested) but with Windows app all the users must be on the same LAN or one gets into a whole other level of complexity like terminal services etc......

Am not into web sites generically - gobs of designers & templates for that stuff - -

cloud based (or web based) application development environment I view as multi part (i.e. front end server development, back end SQL developer, client side developer + the security, etc.); so am unsure whether 1 person is truly able to be expert in all parts or whether I become focused on 1 part alone and find a team to work with....... and what is cost effective for the small to medium business market....