Today I had to represent our institute at an internship fair. Which is quite contrary to my belief that internship should be done outside university, in a company - as one of its main aims is to get a glimpse of what life is like "in the wild".
Nevertheless, I had voulonteered, and so did my part. Which mainly involved actively working against myself... which was kind of fun. For a while. Only it worked too well, so noone even tried coming. So I got a chance to look around myself too.
At some point, A. contacted me and said she needed help with something. That something turned out to be Visual Basic.
Which is an AWFUL language. A few illustrative examples:
a) You can only draw on visual elements that are on forms - not in abstract variables that are just in memory.
b) You cannot draw on buttons - so to put a drawing on a button, you first need to draw it on some other visual element, and then copy it to the button
c) Only you cannot copy by value, only by reference, so you need an extra picture box for each button that you want a picture on. Which in this case resulted in 12 picture boxes that needed to be added to the form, and then hidden first thing on initalization.
d) The standard recommended way of getting the value of pi is 4*atan(1). This was found whilst searching for a polite replacement for a hard-coded constant 0.7854
I could go on, but I'll make it brief and just say that I spent nearly 5 hours wrestling with VB just to make some fairly simple changes to a fairly simple program. But it did remind me just how bad a language can get. I mean, Java is heavenly compared to this... seriously.
At the internship fair, I had won a ticket to a movie in the evening... so I of course went... and now regret the 1.5 hours wasted there. The movie was supposed to be a comedy ("Paul"). Only the jokes were worse than the estonian Stand-up comedians I saw on tuesday evening. And trust me, the standups were pretty damn bad already.
Most other people found the movie enjoyable though... and I think a few years ago, I might have too... but now, it was just bad gay jokes combined with lame and predictable situation comedy... Had I paid, I would want my money back.
By the way, all three of the aforementioned things were done on an empty stomach too. Skipped breakfast and didn't have time for lunch... which happens a bit too often lately..
Despite the outward horror of it all, I actually feel pretty good. Better than I have in quite a bit of time, actually. Guess I am somewhat sadomasochistic after all :)
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