I have trouble criticizing your former programming self for making a decision at an earlier time with the limited information, knowledge and experience. Hindsight is ALWAYS 20/20 and none of our earlier programming would stand up to much scrutiny using today's knowledge and experience. Besides, I've seen a lot of early mainframe programming that made the same kinds of decisions based on the best knowledge they had at the time. Any Cobol programmers out there remember Y2K?
I forgave my early programming, ignorant self a long time ago and tried to learn and do better every day going forward. Now when I look back at my earliest code, I try to focus on the mistakes I could have made but didn't. :) Paul H. Tarver -----Original Message----- From: ProfoxTech [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of M Jarvis Sent: Friday, February 22, 2019 11:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: false news.... On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 6:11 AM Kevin J Cully <[email protected]> wrote: <snip> > I had a potential client where they based their primary keys based on > employee Social Security Numbers. They didn't like it when I told them > that they'd need a complete rewrite. Notice this would have been the case > no matter what language/technology they were using. It was just piss poor > design. > <snip> > I must confess.... I did this once and used SSN's as a primary key. It is my shame.... I was told I had a year and a half to write a enterprise wide application and out of the blue the reality was I had about 3 weeks, and failure would have cost millions and millions... oh - and my job... I was panicked and the first thing I thought to use was the SSN thinking that certainly they wouldn't be changing so as a PK would be handy to use. I went for it w/o thinking it through... Granted, this was back in the day when the internet wasn't what we think of today, but still - it was a really dumb dumb idea I always regretted... -- Matt Jarvis Eugene, Oregon USA --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
