> I threw up a quick database in mysql with the basic fields and I
> wrote some update,modify and search features and stuck it on my
> intranet. A user can log in and change anything in THEIR profile.
> No need to ask someone else and hope they do it. This just seems
> like the most common sensical approach. Yet I find few others who
> think this way.
"Too much work", meaning not enough imagination.
> Perhaps there are some people here who have experience with ACT.
> Could it actually be used by many people as a "marketing database" to
> track leads, do followup, update and delete entries etc.? I recall
I don't know, but I wrote one of them some years back to do my own
telemarketing.
> they replied. I wonder if using ACT now would be similar to what I
> did with MS Word back then.
Oh, that far back, I used Word Star's Mail Merge. It was great!
Some problems sorting the base of data, though... one full read pass
needed per entry... I'd leave the machine running over the weekend to
"re-order" the entries.
> I hope to stir up some discussion about current software development.
> I like the idea of using perl (so many great modules and exisiting
> programs) and the net with a rdbms. And how are software solutions
> found? I reckon you would first determine what you want to do and
> then find the best solution, as opposed to creating limits by
> thinking first of how to mold the software to do what you want.
Yourdon wrote that the best predictor of how quickly a person would
produce software, is how many different programming languages the person
knows, not how many years he or she has been programming.
People who know only one language or two, think in terms of the
language. An advanced person thinks in terms of the concepts first, then
in terms of how to "verbalize" them.
I think the same is true of how many languages a person knows
fluently, from early childhood. I know two human languages from
childhood, (HS French not included,) and some 30 programming languages
last time I counted.
Perl is rather nice, once you get past the execrable special
characters.
Word Star Mail Merge is also kind of cute, a program embedded
language as opposed to the usual data embedded language. (You "encase" or
"escape" the program source embedded within the text, as opposed to
encasing the data as in most languages.) Though I must admit nested
looping in good old "woody" is a bit awkward as it requires embedding
files, and it gets... kind... of... s... l... o... w... But the
interpretive nested variable substitution lets you play some really neat
tricks that boarder on artificial intelligence. Like the code generator I
built, which turned out some 140,000 lines of program code for me over and
over again over a four month period as folks kept changing the specs on
me. (Average programmer only produces 2,500 lines of code per month, more
or less regardless of programming language.) I wrote maybe 2k - 4k lines
of mixed mail merge and C code to do that, micro-templating the C program
source. I've done these kinds of things before...
http://www.mall-net.com/jv/codegen.html
That's why I call some of what I do, "Imagineering".
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