Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
See? I absolutely don't get that from their website, at all. And no, I didn't read ALL their Help/FAQ documentation, before I bought, but I did read about half of the DOCS pages to which you linked. I just...it seemed pretty simple, if you're left-brained and have a background in DBMS or the usual. It never occurred to me that I needed actual PROGRAMMING. I mean, the fundamentals are pretty "click this, insert that."
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It's possible that I got it because of decades doing things like support in corporate environments.
A look at what they offered triggered my "Oh, my. This is powerful but complex. If I were deploying it to users I might wish to provide pre-configured instances covering the basics that could be further customized if needed." reflex.
The issue is that some problems are inherently complicated, and don't
have simple solutions. One example might be uses for the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet program. Serious financial people do a lot of programming in Excel, because it can rice, slice, and dice the numbers any way you like...once you understand how to program it to do that. Gaining that understanding is a long term process.
When you find yourself dealing with
if, then, else cases, you have gone past drag and drop and point and click. (And the problems are in what you pass to IF as the condition to be met, what you pass to THEN as the action to take if the condition is met, and what you pass to ELSE if it isn't.) You are attempting to massage data, and if you don't have a clear idea of how it is currently structured, good luck on
restructuring.
(I recall a story about a legendary programmer in the early days. He was given an assignment, and for a while, people looking in his office would see him drawing diagrams on sheets of paper. Those diagrams were documenting transitions in state, and the various transitions that might be made and the state things would be in before and after. Once he felt he had a clear idea of the state of the data and how it might be transformed, he wrote the program on paper, then typed it into a terminal and tried to run it. He had to make one change which was correcting a typo when he entered the program on the terminal. After that, it just worked, because he started with the
data, clearly understood how it would be structured coming in, and what transitions needed to be made to produce the desired form coming out.)
And my spider sense tingled when I saw that they were also incorporating a macro processor. I consider that a separate area, and would be inclined to deploy it as a separate program. Adding it onto an existing program just multiplies possible support headaches.
I may be starting at shadows here based on bad experiences in the past and it may not be the problem source I might anticipate. I hope not, at least.
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Dennis