Is OOP actually useful?

[NauticalGent]

Am I the only one who was blown away by this?

Apparently not. I remember watching Steve Bishop’s video years ago and not understanding WHY he was so blown away. He kept insisting that this was “huge” and a “game changer” but to this day, I still have no clue.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

One of many milestones in my career was the absolute realization that people will do the damnedest, dumbest things - without hesitation. We have had programs that crashed because some minimum-wage operator sat on a keyboard and flooded the input buffer of our control system - the beginning of "butt-dialing" perhaps?.

We have had people who repeated pounded on the enter key and as a result sent a request five or six times because they didn't get an answer fast enough. THEN, when we sped up the process enough that they got answers ALMOST instantly, they called in because when they checked, the query they submitted seconds ago wasn't running and wasn't in the queue. So they felt that it must have crashed. We told them "look in your home folder for the report." Which usually led to stunned silence that we had been able to accelerate their responses by 30-fold. Not 30%... 30 times faster. 3000%.

Here is the turning point for whether AI will take over. When the following statement is no longer true, we are all in trouble:

Artificial intelligence cannot cope with natural stupidity.

 

[MajP]

Apparently not. I remember watching Steve Bishop’s video years ago and not understanding WHY he was so blown away. He kept insisting that this was “huge” and a “game changer” but to this day, I still have no clue

So I played with this and It is not a game changer, and not huge. I think for those of us who understand the limitations of VBA it was a potential hopeful extension to those limitations. My exuberance is gone. The problem is that the implementation is so limited that the utility is not much. In a real code like .net, java, C Something, ... interfaces are a pretty big deal, but that is because other things like real inheritence and polymorphism work together. There are some kind of cool things you can do, but it is kind of painful to implement. In my improvements to vba this would be down the list. The tops would be
Real inheritance
Ability to overload procedures
Parameterized constructors
Delegates

I will start a thread on interfaces in vba and try to explain the so what. There is some so what, but requires some explaining.

 

[vba_php]

Who needs salesmen any more? AI has taken over that position.

this is not true for recruiters and headhunters. they are still going strong, not to mention going through candidates like freakin water!

I digress. Today I got my first text message from a bot that has taken over the initial candidate search process for the recruiter. see image.

 

[NauticalGent]

I will start a thread on interfaces in vba and try to explain the so what. There is some so what, but requires some explaining.

Yes, please do! A request if I may: when making this thread, please keep in mind that some of us are not true programmers and are just one step above hacker. Screw it, some of us ARE hackers! To quote a line from one of my favorite movies “Please explain it as if you were talking to a small child...or a Golden Retriever...”

 

[vba_php]

Today I got my first text message from a bot that has taken over the initial candidate search process for the recruiter.

speaking of recruiters, is anyone else here currently looking for a new position? I had yet another person call me this morning that had multiple openings to share with me and wanted to submit my credentials for all of them. I didn't mind of course, but i kinda get the feeling that these people want to submit as many profiles to the hiring company as possible in order to look good and show themselves as a company that is able to find viable candidates quickly. does anybody else here have experience dealing with these people?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

When I was working in the oil & gas business (commercial world) I was the liaison with our HR department because they didn't have anyone who could evaluate programmer quality. We used different recruitment teams at different times and all I could say was, they were a mixed bag.

More specifically, some companies sent us folks who worked out great - but one company sent us rejects, misfits, and outright nincompoops. One of their candidates wanted to get into real-time programming and his qualifications were that he had a programmable hand-held calculator. Another candidate had a Master's degree in Pharmacology from the University of the Ryukyus (Okinawa group) with a thesis on psychoactive herbs of the Pacific Islands. His letter included a typical "hippie" salutation. The guy's relocation fees would have been horrific given the distance.

Like any other business, head-hunter recruitment firms depend on the management and employees. When looking for ditch-diggers, not too hard to figure out. When looking for higher-tech, ... they send you ditch diggers. Yeah, I know sometimes we talk about "working down in the trenches" - but we don't meant it literally.

 

[vba_php]

what do you guys think about this?


https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adam...at-when-you-activity-6596007449906466816-P9QZ

 

[Frothingslosh]

From Jdraw

Am I the only one who was blown away by this? I been doing vba for 20 years and have read everything I could. I had no idea that you could define an interface. Never seen an example anywhere. Interfaces are not really inheritance, but kind of acts like it. It is a little clumsy with the name changes, but pretty cool.

If you're interested in an example you can get your hands on, I posted a demo in the OOP thread a couple years back.

 

[MajP]

https://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=308038

I provided some interface discussion in the thread.

 

[kevlray]

speaking of recruiters, is anyone else here currently looking for a new position? I had yet another person call me this morning that had multiple openings to share with me and wanted to submit my credentials for all of them. I didn't mind of course, but i kinda get the feeling that these people want to submit as many profiles to the hiring company as possible in order to look good and show themselves as a company that is able to find viable candidates quickly. does anybody else here have experience dealing with these people?

I have not tried to look for a new position for several years. At this point I do not want to mess up anything with my retirement benefits (I am looking about retiring in 3.5 years). Also my skills are wide and varied which works well for where I am at, but not so sure about anywhere else.

 

[vba_php]

At this point I do not want to mess up anything with my retirement benefits (I am looking about retiring in 3.5 years).

you wouldn't be able to fathom how much the University of Iowa employees and UI hospital employees get in retirement. UI professors and employees have TIA CREFF accounts, which are very generous in retirement, but what is more insane than that is the state of Iowa public employees retirement system (IPERS). I know plenty of old people receivers IPERS benefits now that they're retired and most of them say that they are receiving more money per year in retirement than they ever made in a single year working! most of the people i know that have this acccount are hospital workers, public school teachers, government workers and bus drivers.

 

[vba_php]

hey all you veterans here (and people that know more than I do), you have been showcased as "competent people in your field" by me on facebook to people that think they know more by taking a ridiculous test in silicon valley (scroll down to reply #4 to see).

https://www.facebook.com/triplebyte...05293520285&reply_comment_id=2603743526376816

If any of you take offense to this, I can certainly remove it. Just say so. I initially taught them a thing or 2 because some young buck there thought he all was high and mighty because he insisted that knowing bitwise ops was essential in this day in age for finding success as a programmer:

https://www.facebook.com/triplebyte...983269723046&reply_comment_id=206540907035476

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Adam, depending on what you are trying to do, which might include device drivers or other kernel-level code, at least some understanding of bitwise ops is MANDATORY since the world's most popular O/S has interfaces that use it and even depend on it. For that matter, just try to use the options in a message box to instruct Access and Windows how to make that box behave like you want. Did you not realize that some of those options are bit-encoded and some of them are bit-group encoded?

If you aren't doing that particular kind of work for a living, though, you are probably right to avoid bitwise ops. They would only confuse you in that case and lead you to make dumb mistakes.

 

[vba_php]

Did you not realize that some of those options are bit-encoded and some of them are bit-group encoded?

I might have richard. the point I was trying to make, which I'm sure you realize, is that there are a lot of non-engineering minded people out there trying to do this type of work....some failing some succeeding I'm sure. but the coding is so high level anymore in any language, I would be surprised that if someone goes to college specifically for a computer science degree, they are NOT taught about bitwise ops. Maybe they are, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they are not. After all, colleges are facing huge competition these days with cheaper options available, aren't they?

as a side note to this, I probably won't be posting much on the forum in the coming days. I really should catch up on my sleep that I've been lacking. And I'm sure Richard, that some of your friends here will be happy to take a break from my presence.

it's also noteworthy to say that after I shot that hot head down on facebook and probably made him feel terrible about himself to boot, I DID send a polite email message to the support staff and executives at TripleByte, giving them a link to this thread and telling them that they could learn a lot from you vets, which would in turn produce a better test and possibly earn them more business in the future. I have not heard back from any of them, however.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

I can't speak about modern curricula, but when I went to college we learned about basic assertoric logic including the various binary relations like AND, OR, XOR, EQU, etc. Whether you use them in True/False logic analysis or in bit-twiddling doesn't matter. Whether your language supports bit packing or it requires that a Boolean always occupies a full byte, the concepts that underlie bit twiddling are sine qua non for anyone who wants to call himself a decent programmer.

I like to think that my own background coming through things like learning how to build your own logic circuits and operational amplifiers helped me to understand how computers interacted with the real world for my own industrial computing applications so many years ago. Not to mention that I would pit my own assembly-level code against anyone else for efficiency AND effectiveness.

 

[vba_php]

Boolean always occupies a full byte, the concepts that underlie bit twiddling are sine qua non for anyone who wants to call himself a decent programmer.

are bools always a full byte?


thanks richard. your insights are always a pleasure to read. i've never left a thread here on the forum where I didn't learn something new if you posted in it.

 

[Galaxiom]

are bools always a full byte?)

Boolean True is represented by -1 which is a full byte of 1s. My conjecture is that -1 was chosen for True because all bits were on.

SQL Server doesn't have Boolean. It has bit. It uses compression where up to eight bit columns are stored in one byte.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Galaxiom, can't confirm or deny your conjecture, but I know that on a lot of old machines, they ALWAYS did a Boolean NOT by using the COM (1's complement negate) instruction and did the arithmetic "negate" using the NEG (2's complement negate) instruction. Which was the chicken and which was the egg? Damned if I know.

However, some of the really OLD machines used 1's complement math. I.e. "negate" and "NOT" were the SAME OPERATION. Some time in the 1950's someone realized that there was merit in a 2's complement negate and the associated integer format, since in that case no subsequent adjustment was needed to do your integer math. So it is POSSIBLE that some of the "oddities" we see surrounding TRUE being -1 or simply anything non-zero depended on which convention the oldest machines uses.

 

[kevlray]

you wouldn't be able to fathom how much the University of Iowa employees and UI hospital employees get in retirement. UI professors and employees have TIA CREFF accounts, which are very generous in retirement, but what is more insane than that is the state of Iowa public employees retirement system (IPERS). I know plenty of old people receivers IPERS benefits now that they're retired and most of them say that they are receiving more money per year in retirement than they ever made in a single year working! most of the people i know that have this acccount are hospital workers, public school teachers, government workers and bus drivers.

With the current calculations I have made. It appears that I will take home about the same as I do now if I get the social security benefits I am counting on. The good thing about our retirement system (so far). My 'money' will never run out. So if I live to 120, at least I will still get my county retirement money.