... and Excel and Access. So much shadow IT got developed because Excel (+VBA, which is almost as powerful as regular VB6, including calls to the native win32 DLL API) is present everywhere, and Access is pretty widespread as well.
I read somewhere that the number of Excel "programmers" is an order or magnitude larger than all professional programmers in all other languages put together.
I got my start in professional software development by building an multi-user Access shadow-IT database application that made heavy use of VBA. It only worked because it had a couple of active users at any time, and I left that workplace with documentation consisting of a half-page of bullet points. I know for certain that it was still in usage four years after I left, though God know how long it kept operating in the end.
Notwithstanding that shadow IT is the bane of my existence these days, I sometimes need to be reminded of how far a motivated individual can come when they have access to adequate tools and information.
