Comment by dgxyz

13 days ago

Fuck all this pointless noise, verbose analysis, LLMs and other associated crap.

Just someone give me MS Access for the web with an SSO module and let me drive it.

That'd cover 99% of LOB app needs and allow me to actually get shit done without tools that dissolve in my hands or require hordes of engineers to keep running or have to negotiate with a bullshit generator to puke out tens of thousands of lines of unmaintainable javascript crap.

We have achieved nothing in the last 25 years if we can't do that. Everyone who entered the industry since about 2005 appears to be completely braindead on how damn easy it was to get stuff actually done back then.

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dgxyz

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sien  12 days ago

Yeah. Absolutely. Access and Visual Basic was the one low code platform that really worked.

The Apache foundation or someone ought to target that as a proper Open Source setup.

normanvalentine  13 days ago

I'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005.

Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?

  • cheschire  13 days ago

    Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA.

    Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.

    • csomar  12 days ago

      I think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on top of its database, you'd essentially be starting from scratch anyway. The reality is that the web is complicated because we want endless possibilities while staying fully connected.

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    • dgxyz  12 days ago

      It did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server.

      Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.

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NetMageSCW  12 days ago

Someone upstream said Mendix is what you are looking for? (Know Access pretty well, don’t know a thing about Mendix.)

pphysch  13 days ago

> MS Access for the web with an SSO

This is essentially Rails and Django and so on

  • dgxyz  12 days ago

    That's not even remotely close to the idea. It's conceptually entirely different.

    I'll note that Access existed in a completely usable form before the www even existed.

    • pphysch  12 days ago

      How is it conceptually different? RDBMS ORM-based web frameworks (with built-in Admin GUIs) ate the web-oriented crowd, and the rest are happy managing their data in Excel. That doesn't leave much room for MS Access.

      2 replies →