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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

Perfect, they can combine the two of the most dreaded technology's to work on. Salesforce powered by Sharepoint!

http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...

I knew Sharepoint and Salesforce didn't get much love, but has Wordpress really slipped that low? Is it because it's PHP?

Perhaps because it's constantly hacked and used to spread malware.

Its usually the plethora of shitty plugins that provide the back-doors, WordPress, albeit a clunky system, is actually quite secure. The same thing happened with Windows in the days, most blue screens of dead were caused by crappy 3rd party drivers, the OS just happened to be the messenger.

Actually, the entire LAMP stack is just a couple of notches below Wordpress, and Wordpress is a LAMP product. Could be Wordpress is just the most hated LAMP implementation...or because Wordpress is so hated they hate LAMP too.

i can't speak much about core codebase, but plugins in general written quite badly too often. These will have security issues, html/php/javascript/css spaghetti in one file. From what I understand - there is no vetting process to accept new developers, nor API forces developers write secure/readable code.

PHP automatically scores a few demerit points in most circles, but it's not just any-old PHP. It's PHP that's evolved over the better part of a decade and is full of bad ideas that are now baked into the WordPress system permanently.

Like Drupal it's overgrown with weeds. You need to keep pruning to keep moving, or you'll be a victim of backwards compatibility. Just ask Microsoft about that, or those trying to clean up OpenSSL.

There are other systems that are far worse, but they're not as popular so they're irrelevant. Nobody cares about Movable Type any more, for example.

Do you have an example of a bad idea in Wordpress that has a real-world impact on a sizable portion of its userbase?

front controller pattern?

Could you elaborate a bit on the reasons for your opposition to front controllers?

Their quirky database layer is but one example of the house of horrors that is their code base.

It would be less of an issue if you could swap out parts of it, but you can't.

Microsoft has made billions being a "victim" of backwards compatibility. But I guess the point is that money doesn't necessarily correlate with pleasant codebase.

After having used Sharepoint I can completely understand why people hate it. But I am a little surprised by Salesforce (and Wordpress too).

Can anyone explain why it is so bad?

Salesforce is extremely complicated and requires an expert to configure it properly. Even then, it may not be able to do everything they say it can do in a performant manner.

This is no joke. It feels like something out of the MS-DOS era.

It is genuinely my favorite program to use. It is performant and reliable, and I deal with 100s or accounts and tickets every day. Configuration is key.

Requires an expert to configure? No shit! What enterprise CRM software doesn't require a vendor to install and integrate?

I was able to get the open-sourced version SugarCRM up and running without that much hassle. We used it for a while.

Having used Salesforce as a support ticketing system (because it integrated with what sales used), it really is painful to use.

It's like a webapp from the 90s, every action triggers a complete page reload; complete with an occasionally buggy UI, limited searchability, restrictive UI, and occasionally misrouted tickets that were impossible to find. But mostly, it was just really slow.

I've talked to a few other folks who had similar experiences at other companies. In every case, I got the impression that using Salesforce was a mandate made by management without consulting the folks who'd actually have to use it every day.

Maybe it's a bit better on the CRM side, or if your company pays the extra money for Desk.com... but I really wouldn't recommend using Salesforce for handling support tickets.

And from the developer side, integrating with Salesforce is a pain. They have 50 different ways of doing the same thing, and you have to do it a certain way under certain conditions. There's no unification in their APIs.

I did a little bit of Salesforce API work several years back, and it was a delight compared to Netsuite integration.

> 50 different ways of doing the same thing, and you have to do it a certain way under certain conditions.

How is that any different from other programming interfaces?

Do you also not like dynamic typing because it gives you more flexibility?

What I meant was that,for example, there's two different kind of users for salesforce, organizational users and portal users. If you want to use authentication for them, you have to hit two separate endpoints with separate semantics.

I don't like dynamic typing for other, myriad reasons :)

I have a completely different experience with it. I routinely deal with 100s of tickets every day. Assigning, keeping track, searching and performance has been stellar over the 2 years I have been using it. Re look, sure it looks dated but at least it does not look like bootstrap which would have been worse.

Is Google still using Salesforce? They seem to be hiring more Salesforce engineers.

So does Apple, but probably for their Watch integration or improving internal CRM.

All major tech consulting firms are employing SF as a backend. It is perceived as an extremely secure product.

For what it's worth, when compared to Salesforce Service Cloud, Desk.com is the less expensive support option aimed at small businesses. There is an integration between Desk.com and your Salesforce data, but they're otherwise completely separate systems.

Disclaimer: I work there

I can't speak as an actual Salesforce user, but I did do a Salesforce integration for my company a few years ago - integrating Salesforce into our backend systems. It was quite a painful process.

The documentation is dense and somewhat difficult to follow - I ended up spending a lot of time reading forum posts to get a grip on how to use it. The API at the time was also SOAP/XML, with all the fun joy that comes with using that (although, in fairness, it looks like they now have a REST/JSON API too).

The API limits are also draconian, resulting in all kinds of code nastiness to stay within the usage limits. In our case, because of how things are stored in Salesforce and how the API is constructed, it might take 5+ API calls to update various parts of a single Account. We ended up batching changes and sending them every hour or so, and just had to tell our sales folks that info in Salesforce may be delayed up to an hour.

Not to mention, from a UX perspective, it feels like the 00s never ended.

We later ended up switching to Zurmo with a very heavy amount of customization. It ended up making more business sense to bring it in house and pay someone to customize it for exactly what we needed than to sign another Salesforce contract.

We recently did a Salesforce integration where we used the Restforce gem[0] and it was rather easy to setup and use.

[0] https://github.com/ejholmes/restforce

Wordpress is a legacy blogging system that comes from the same era of big bloated web apps as eg the various infamously slow and bloated php forums.

The average wordpress theme will have over 10,000 lines of html, php, javascript, css in it.

Wordpress itself has continued to massively expand for no apparent reason. 10,000 lines of code in 2003; 20,000 in 2004; 30,000 in 2005; 40,000 in 2006; 60,000 in 2007; 90,000 in 2008; 120,000 in 2009; 140,000 in 2010; 150,000 in 2011; 160,000 in 2012; 230,000 in 2013; 300,000 in 2014.

It's like the Spruce Goose of cms. Yeah it'll fly, but it's ridiculous.

It's not. People love to complain about ultra-successful software. Sure, it's not perfect, but Salesforce, at least, is a very functional and expandable service.

I am surprised that SharePoint got so little love from Microsoft since 2007. Basically all the cruft is still beneath the surface of v2013. I heard Microsoft Redmond outsourced the development to Microsoft India branch which does most of the C# development. The basic concept of SharePoint fulfills what Cairo & WinFS never delivered - so it's actually great, but it has some rough edges and no one cares to fix older features.

Salesforce would fit to Microsoft's product portfolio. They have Microsoft Dynamics CRM but Salesforce offers more features. Then the have Microsoft Dynamics ERP which consists of 5 different ERP products that Microsoft bought: Microsoft Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta), Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains Software), Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision), Microsoft Dynamics SL (formerly Solomon IV), Microsoft Dynamics C5 (formerly Concorde C5). Salesforce would theoretically be renamed to Dynamics CRM SF.

Eh, not really. From what I hear, the core work is still in Redmond. It's just a shitty product with a shitty team.

It seems to have been purposely designed to require multiple page loads and lots of scrolling to get the core information on an account (e.g. notes on last correspondence, contact details, value of current opportunity, next task) which you'd ideally want all visible on a single screen. Instead, you need multiple tabs. If a company you haven't met isn't already in the system, then adding their details, a brief note on your meeting and a record of the new business opportunity involves you remembering the correct order to complete a minimum of four web form submits and ten page loads, and you'll have to do a surprising amount of manual work to link those records together properly. It compounds this with slow page load speeds; back at my old company we nicknamed it Snailsforce.

These are basics you'd expect any CRM software to handle well, but it's also surprisingly bad at things you'd expect a darling of the enterprise world to do well at (representation of structure of corporate groups, representation of client decision making hierarchies, representation of individuals' roles at multiple clients, ability to find companies by geography etc.) And needless to say, the corporate versions that have been hacked to fit specific needs add all manner of monstrous new forms to fill in and weird bugs with price calculation.

If there's one thing that sums the service up it's this: if you're locked out of Salesforce[1] the screen which advises you of this provides an email address for their help team... which turns out to be autoresponder advising you that the mailbox is not being monitored so please log into Salesforce to lodge the response.

There is a good discussion about this:

http://meta.salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/1946/is-s...

It looks like research did not have representative population.

I'm going to get downvoted into the abyss.

The only languages I would consider for an enterprise system in the most loved technologies would be C# and Python. The rest look good for startups, open source or hobby projects. When you build systems for the enterprise that need to be robust and live for years on end. It's hard to justify taking a risk with a newer language for which there is less expertise and less libraries.

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