• misterhuh@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Old Fortran/Cobal programmer and those words were like magical words to thwart off any management questions. “Running out to get a coffee” “What now?” “Compiling” “Grab me one also would ya” Magic, just magic.

    • jadero@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I once came across this massive Excel program. Calling it a macro or even a script simply didn’t do it justice. Anyway, I turned it into a script (calling Excel functions and actions instead of doing everything “by hand”). It went from taking a couple of hours to run to taking a couple of minutes. Pissed off a few people, but I got a nice contract out of it :)

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      More recent than this, but around 2010 I got roped into writing an app for Blackberry. Blackberry apps were written in Java which shouldn’t have taken any time at all to compile, but to run code on a BB every module used had to be signed by the Blackberry servers, which were usually completely down or running so slowly that the tiniest changes to the code took upwards of an hour to be testable on the device. It was wonderful to have a built-in excuse for sitting around doing fucking nothing, with extra irony from the fact that Blackberry crashed and burned before the app was released so none of it made the slightest difference anyway.