Resurrecting a long dead thread here briefly, but wanted to respond to some of the posters who ask "what's the point" of threads like this, and I just wanted to say I LOVE these types of threads. I just got reassigned on a contracting position and need to come up to speed with Siemens, and I'm blown away by how bad it is...and my ancestry is half German , so I want to give the Germans the benefit of the doubt, but this product is stuck in 1985 when it comes to usability and just programming concepts in general, I mean needing to use pointers to do array references, compiling to STL so uploads aren't in the original language if you don't have the source, only showing one FC in runtime at a time? It's obvious it was built 30 years ago by computer engineers who had all 150 assembler instructions of their processor memorized and thought STL was the bomb...but come on Siemens, invest a little in trying to keep your product up to date...I mean in 30 years it doesn't look like they tried to modernize this stuff at all...so it's all well and good if you want your chemical plant programmed by a Comp. Sci guy who has no idea how a heat exchanger works, but for an automation engineer like me who has a Chem E. degree and has never written assembler, this is just the worst product I've seen.
So I love these threads, because when I see a seasoned poster like Peter Natchway hating this stuff as much as me, I don't feel so alone in my struggle...it helps me power through it, and these threads also usually end up with a lot of useful tips from the Siemens experts trying to defend the product they've grown up on and have learned to love...which is fine too...as one poster said, it's great job security since it's so hard to learn, but what blows me away is how relatively common this stuff is despite how bad it is, especially outside of the US from what I hear...