VBA - the rodney dangerfield of the rodney dangerfield. It may get no respect but for business computing it is crazy useful. I have been using it to manage datafiles/build databases
Ain't that the freaking truth. Same goes for VB.
I am a VB/VB.NET programmer, and I never get any respect. But I chalk it up to the same phenomenon that makes all poseur musicians gravitate toward drums: The low barrier for entry means that the very bad at it can get their feet wet.
I once had the pleasure of replacing an EBCDIC to ASCII converter that some guy wrote in C++. It was wonky and only worked half the time. The guy was an OOP methodology zealot. made EVERYTHING an object, even things that really required simple, straight code. It was a console app..you gave it a file path of an EBCDIC file, and it returned a file path of the ascii coverted file. We were converting gigabytes of railroad commission files, and the thing would run for hours. After that, we still hadda run a bunch of manual conversions and things to get this big text file in a format we could use.
Anyway, i replaced it with VB6 code. My VB6 code was stable, and had bells and whistles: a visual progress bar, the ability to parse the data for the various databases we used it with, the ability to check for exceptions against pre-existing data (we were merging well-head data from the RR commission with what we had), and the ability to backup and FTP the data to our other data center, reporting. All with a point and click. The process went from one that took a technical person to nurse it through to one that a minimum-wage monkey could do most of the time.
And the best part? My code was
significantly faster than his. The week I debuted my re-write, my boss said "You know, I never
really considered VB a real programming language until now."