This reminds me of a job I had back in the mysts of time (...or more likely around 2003ish).
I was brought into a project where a seniour data scientist was working with MS Access but was runing out of room as it, at the time, had a database size limit of 1Gb on disk and our data set was about 2.5Gb in size.
We could have ported the whole thing to SQLite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL or even Oracle as we had site wide licences available.
Nope. MS Access was the favourite tool of this guy so in MS Access the data had to stay and I had to write code to juggle data between multiple simulataniously connect databases on a single machine.
This taught me a lot about how scienitst and accademics approach software engineering. My boss was both brilliant and really dum at the same time. He just wanted to get from A-to-B as "simply" as possible. He wasn't interested maintainablitly or assethics.
To this day the whole business still brings me out in a cold sweat of cognative disonance because on some level I know he may have had a point but on the other hand... I STILL have the flatspot that work gave me on my forehead from all the pointless wall banging involved.
I still beleive his work saved the company involved millions if not billions over years since it was presented.
(...and I have never accepted another contract involving VBA or other Microsoft technologies since.)
I was brought into a project where a seniour data scientist was working with MS Access but was runing out of room as it, at the time, had a database size limit of 1Gb on disk and our data set was about 2.5Gb in size.
We could have ported the whole thing to SQLite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL or even Oracle as we had site wide licences available.
Nope. MS Access was the favourite tool of this guy so in MS Access the data had to stay and I had to write code to juggle data between multiple simulataniously connect databases on a single machine.
This taught me a lot about how scienitst and accademics approach software engineering. My boss was both brilliant and really dum at the same time. He just wanted to get from A-to-B as "simply" as possible. He wasn't interested maintainablitly or assethics.
To this day the whole business still brings me out in a cold sweat of cognative disonance because on some level I know he may have had a point but on the other hand... I STILL have the flatspot that work gave me on my forehead from all the pointless wall banging involved.
I still beleive his work saved the company involved millions if not billions over years since it was presented. (...and I have never accepted another contract involving VBA or other Microsoft technologies since.)