That time when your table start looking like a Toblerone..

And then crash crash.. crash...crash

When GCC gives up on you..

Hi guys!
That is my first...well, rant? No, not at all.

I found this community by accident. I was looking for something like this, but did not realize til now. I scrolled through some posts and it is awesome to read awesome stories and rants from awesome people.

I am a 21 year old SAP ABAP developer from Germany. I have finished my bachelor's degree (business informatics/business information management? German: Wirtschaftsinformatik) last August. I have always been interested in web development and teached myself some php basics when I was younger. I would love to do more things like that, but things have changed. There are lots of different frameworks, languages and stuff. It's complicated.

I am not sure if I have understood how this community works, but I am very excited to find out.

And, as I already mentioned, I am German. So please feel free to bash my shitty English. :D

It's about a guy that knows better.

I was working as a subcontractor on a bigger system. We (subs) were not allowed to deploy code, we had to wait for contractor to deploy.

One day I got an email that my code is bugged and that my feature is not working on production. I checked it on test env, everything was fine. Then I checked if the code I wrote was deployed. It was not.

I send an email explaining that if they deployed my code it would be working. Then I got a response. There was a bug in my code.

Another email. I asked how would they know? Do they have a test on their environment that failed?

No. There is one guy that READ my code and he said it should not work, so he will not deploy it. He was not a programmer, he was a business consultant responsible for the documentation.

His issue was that I used a function that was not in a class. So if the function is not declared it's obvious it will not work. I had to explain to him in another email, that you can use object of another class inside your class and then call a function, that is not in your class. It was the last time this guy blocked my deploy.

TL;DR, I had to explain a non-dev how object composition works in order to have my code deployed. Took four emails.

Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:

Me:

Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files

Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software

Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP

IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files

Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp

Network: No internet access, internal company network only

Web browser: IE 6

Graphical design software: msPaint

Version control: Emails

Team communication: Emails

Software distribution vector: Emails

Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers

Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.

ABAP by SAP. The syntax is horrible in my opinion. I'm glad I don't need it any more.

Have worked on Java, Objective C, ABAP etc.
Learning JavaScript Basics now. This shit is crazy.

SAP.

enough said.

HR wanted a Feedback-Interview, they choose me because I am new (first job as a Developer).
They wanted the pros/cons from my perspective and how to get more people into the company.

There was nothing bad that I could have said about the company, I really had to watch out so it doesnt sound like I wanna crawl into someones ass.
It changed when we talked about programming itself...

I am a ABAP Developer, we are developing with the EWM Extension. If you dont happen to know what I am talking about then you didnt miss a thing. Documentation feels like its not existend, the language is made to be red like Text for easy use but does a terrible job at that, the standard editor that you have to use lacks a ton of usefull features, the standard functions and classes that you HAVE to use are not structured well and need to be debugged to know how to use them, and and....

There is much more, but if the company wouldnt be so damn nice, I might have wanted to go away already.

ABAP: Advanced Business Application Programming.
EWM: Extended Warehouse Management.

I'm a .Net developer from Morocco, i'm currently working on an accounting software for this fucking company owned by an American boss. And i'm handling every single aspect of the project including the back-end (C#), Database (Sql Server), Reports (crystal reports, ABAP, VSTO), and design (UI, logos, animation...). For a salary of 300 USD/month, with no insurance, no transportation fees, and no fuck given about my health or my coworkers'. Not mentioning the shitty working hours and condition.
This is my first (job)

ABAP - a language that is frozen in the 60s
PHP - an inconsistent language
Flashplayer - do i need to say more?
Internet Explorer - ↑

SAP - ERP & ABAP :|

Best: gaining experience and learning new ways to write programs in the best way possible, even beyond working hours

Worst: the amount of ABAP code I saw these past two years gives me nightmares, and older programmers don't seem to want to improve and advance from the old ways of the language 😥

So in grade 11 (2 years ago),i had to do something called "job shadowing".basically you choose a profession and you go to a workplace. My cousin (who's in the same SAP industry)got me into this SAP development place.there were like quite a few "developers" but mostly business analysts.they made me learn this (in my oppinion) absolute shit language called ABAP which I found to be mostly glorified SQL . First I had to just create a small program which I did in like a few minutes after my mentor taught me the basic commands but you have to learn alot of module numbers and other shit.and guess what ,I remember I had to end one liners with a damn full stop,seriously fucking irritating.
So,worst dev technology I've worked with ever is SAP.Bad thing is my cousin and my uncle are really trying to take me into that bullshit SAP shit of theirs but I always refuse.will never step my foot into a SAP development job ever.

People rant about missing semicolon which can be easily solved by switching to a better IDE. And here I am working on a language in which statement terminates with Dot(.) Which is so easy to miss. And worst part is that I can't change IDE.

Fucking Eclipse at it again.

Colleague was setting up their IDE for working with the ABAP R/3 backend, we use. To speed up the process, colleague A is sending the zipped plugins folder to the new colleague B and telling them to put them into the directory of where eclipse is stored.

Like a good and neat person, B renamed the folder plugins into plugins _old and unzipped the other folder in there. Clicked on eclipse and nothing worked, Error message immediately.

B then proceeded to tell A that it didn't work. A then asked "how did you copy the stuff in there?", and B said that they backed up the original and put the new one in there (mind you, technically that should work, because the eclipse versions were pretty close to eachother, only like a few patches apart).

And then A said, "No No No, you need to just overwrite it."
So that's what B did. Okay so original plugins folder has been overwritten with the sent plugins folder. B clicks eclipse.

Eclipse starts, and shows loading screen.

For like 5 minutes.

Then crashes with sone random error message.

B asks A what's going on, and what cracked me up was, that A just said: "Yeah, it's supposed to crash, just restart it".
So B clicked it again, it launched for another like 5 Minutes and then opened normally, with everything where it should be.

B asks then, if that's normal, and the other devs in the call replied "Yeah, we did it like that too"

ngl, that was one of the funnier teams meetings i had in a while

In today's job interview for an apprenticeship for the "Anwendungsentwicklung" position where they specialize in SAP systems (ABAP).

They told me that this position is a new thing in their company and that they want me, once I agree with their contract (which they will send later), to take responsibility for that.

I'm fine with that.

Now comes the part that is bugging me. They also said that the IT manager does not want to be disturbed often, if I have questions.

(I mean I will definitely have some questions. I am an apprentice after all, right? Like why should I join your apprenticeship program, if you refuse to teach me stuff? I can study on my own, as well and not be in your program.)

Just a few times and that's it. They admitted that they do not know much about that position and that I have to learn most things myself. No books and no other resources. They also do not know where the school is going to be yet.

The people in the interview I've spoken to where nice and we made some jokes here and there, but the fact that the company does not want to support me in an apprenticeship is saddening.

I do not know...maybe I'm just too concerned and this is normal day to day stuff for apprentices, but from what I have read about apprenticeships this is not the right thing to do as a company on the internet.

Correct me in the comments, if you think differently.

I will use this company as a last resort.

Calling a routine from an instance method (don't even ask, in ABAP, you can do that)

I'm an ABAP developer...I'm slowly getting the impression I'm the only one on this planet :)

Seriously, the person who thought creating a monster like OpenSQL should be shamed in public. This thing really is the pinnacle of misanthropy and working with it feels like having a constant root canal treatment.

Today my unixstickers propack arrived finally!🤑
Telling the truth I am not evnolved in any of these technologies 🤣. I am an SAP/ABAP consultant with one year of experience and I don't feel I am going to put these over my Thinkpad🤔
Maybe it's time to get some devRant stickers, I really love them☺️

For some test cases some text was overlapping. I tryed many times different ways and in the end what I did was changing the paragraph and putting a standard one and fitted it perfectly forever.

Got to do some security audit of legacy ABAP code for SAP systems. Do people still use it? If yes, why.

What exactly is boilerplate code?

Anyone here who's willing to help me with some ABAP Dynpro programming ? Kinda struggling to get anything to work.

Hi Guys. I am new here. I have just graduated and been selected in an organisation as ABAP developer. Now I don't know the future aspects of it, as it is something new to me. What would you guys suggest me on it. Is it worth investing time? Or should I start something else in parallel and make a switch?

I had an introductory course on C during my engineering (using the Turbo C compiler). Got interested there and started learning on my own during the breaks between semesters. Mainly ended up doing basic things with VB 6, C, C++ and some Windows programming using a language called BCX Basic.

Then ended up being introduced to HTML, JavaScript and Java during my first job and ABAP in the next. Also managed to learn a little of Python in my spare time (weekends) along the way.

I still continue learning the basics of new languages in my spare time (planning to start with PHP next).

Anyone working on SAP projects? ABAP language? Just received an internship offer and wondering if it's interesting stuff or not.

How bad is SAP really? I have seen so many rants about it, but it still seems to be thriving. It is used everywhere here in India. I work at IT department of a Hospital, and even they use SAP— the only complains I have heard is it’s cost, so they are slowly replacing it with Open Source alternatives like ERPNext.

Who here works with SAP ? How different is learning like ABAP from mainstream languages like Java ? More specially, what really makes ERP softwares so different from the rest ?

This post is going to be long and it might not be the platform to ask for it's mainly for ranting yet I wanted to ask a non toxic community.
I'm mainly an ABAP programmer working on an SAP system for my living. No matter how people inside the SAP sphere look at it, it's not exactly cutting edge technology in the world of software development. (and in my opinion it's not even a knife)
As I work in an enterprise environment I have trouble about finding gaps where I can learn newer technologies and thus, I've decided to learn in my free time.
I tend to tilt toward web development as do many I know because I see potential in the GUI which HTML and CSS achieve. And I do believe that combining that with languages such as JS, Python, Ruby, Erlang and Elixir can give way to a healthy experience both in Web development and even desktop development.
In order to avoid overwhelming myself I wish to start with learning web development. Time is not of the essence because I plan to continue working with ABAP for close future, around the next 2 years, and I'm young.
I wanted to ask the community, is there any developer in here that was in the same position and can give out some pointers to the path they took? Is it wise to start my path from HTML5 and CSS3 without looking back to the older ways? Any resource you'd share will be welcomed.

So what type of language is ABAP ? Is it procedural, with support for object-oriented paradigms ?

I’m trying to download the SAP GUI on my Mac to practice and learn ABAP. But the download page redirects to something weird. Speaking of which, is it really hard to get help/resources for something less mainstream and highly specialized like ABAP as opposed to a language like Java, C#.