Our application calls Fucking Microsoft Excel over COM to figure out what letters denote year, month, and day in the current locale.

Hint: date format strings are highly standardized so it's always y, m and d

Localized date formats 🤔

That sounds like a great recipe for chaos! 😈

Ugh, the pain.

The shitty thing is, thanks to global state and a very haphazard and unprincipled DI scheme, I'm not even allowed to remove all of it because who knows, maybe some other part of the application depends on an Excel spreadsheet being loaded.

Excel automation will haunt my dreams forever. Hang in there.

@TheEnd At least removing Excel automation is a priority. Removing incidental "lucky" initialization is entirely out of budget and the odds that we would ever assign a budget for it diminishes with each month.

I always think that devs from the past that made such a mess for us in the future to solve are some sort of chrono-sadistic fucks.
Like, imagine if they have made some sort of internal combustion engines that warm up the entire fucking planet.
Or, much worse, if they've made up hundreds of different but entirely unecessary ways to encode binaries or date formats. Just for shits and giggles.

@JsonBoa and one of those fuckers has brought us JS.

@Lensflare the guy that made node and Deno is a very cool guy btw. He's not the best presenter of his product, but it's cool that he did it himself.

There are some differences tough regarding date formats. Cool that com still exists, that's really 90's tech right? What about some nice OCX components, you got those too?