A few years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote a wonderful article for his site called The Law of Leaky Abstractions, the general idea of which was that while new design technologies such as programming tools that let you build data interfaces by clicking and dragging controls might make things easier for the average professional, they will never replace a solid understanding of the technologies they are built on top of. This is because the tools that do so much work behind the scenes never offer the fine control that the lower level tools will. They also provide an illusion of power that makes it easy to avoid learning the real substance. The article provided some good examples and now I have one of my own to share.
Living in Outlook
In my last post, I included the outline for the series on Access VBA that I’m writing. Of course, an outline is just that – a rough summary of what the finished project should look like. It can’t be carved in stone. So while I’m working on the chapters for decision loops, I realize that I don’t have…