Flashback to the turn of the millennium, when this programmer pilot fish is hired to help out with a factory’s custom shop-floor applications.

“There was one Visual Basic 6 application, written by an engineer named Barney who had left the company, that the entire shop floor ran on,” says fish. “It worked, barely, and I’m not going to knock the guy who wrote it — for an engineer who had no formal training in programming, he did a pretty good job based on the skills he had.

“But my boss had a close working relationship with Barney, and was convinced the man was the world’s greatest programmer.”

So as the VB6-based system begins developing issues over time, fish is tasked with correcting the problems — but with specific orders not to upgrade it to any other platform. It has to remain in VB6.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here