At work I use an IDE called WinDEV, that aims at making development painless. But it sucks. Really.  The language has no pointers, no lists, no dynamic arrays, hash-like structures only return string elements, and, more icing on the cake, some of the built-in functions and procedures make the developper (me) go mad.

Imagine : I wanted to list the files contained in a directory, and then attach them to an email. Quite simple hu ?
No

The function fListeFichiers returns the number of files in a directory. It takes three parameters : the files mask (like “C:\MyApp\SubDirectory\*.pdf”), a string containing the name of the procedure which will be called for each file found (and which has a particular signature, something like “path, filename, pointer”), and, a pointer that will be given to the procedure mentionned above.

Doesn’t that sound nice ? Even if WinDEV help doesn’t know what a pointer is… I wish I could use Ruby (my current favourite language) to write something clear like :

Dir::chdir(the_dir)
foreach Dir[*\.pdf] { |f| email.attach(f) }

*sigh* WinDEV makes me love Ruby, Perl, and all those real languages. I think I gonna like C more from now.

Anyone who would know how to CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) WinDEV Hyperfiles from Ruby is welcome to teach me.