Recently I wished for "VB for Web". Something that'd make it easy for a tech-competent, but a non-programmer, person to prototype a functional web application.
Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
101–110 of 232 posts
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#102For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…
> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
I spend all of my working hours with modern PHP.
IMHO, although its improved A LOT it’s still a mess. But with the right tooling you can kinda-sorta make it behave like a sane language if you squint a bit.
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#103For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…
> I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP)
It's been ages since I've last seen Delphi in real life - must be over 20 years ago by now.
But I'd not put PHP in the same league of "dead and bad" with it... yes, it's not the "hipster" language these days, that's been taken over by in frontend, NodeJS in the backend and Go for "need to quickly cobble something together"... but it still powers dominant parts of the web. Obviously Wordpress, Typo3 and Drupal in the CMS area which power a large amount of individual websites, and then the large behemoths Facebook, Wikipedia and Fandom/Wikia.
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#104Your article hits the nail on the head. I loved programming for VB6, VBA and VBScript.
PHP has the same issue, it is awesome and powerful but gets a bad rep because the versions before 2004 had issues and the low barriers to get started means beginners love PHP.
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#105For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…
> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
> but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4?
If you have a background in C programming, most of the "wtf" is completely reasonable - the only thing "modern" and novice PHP programmers will still raise the WTF flag about is the standard library, mostly the string manipulation functions, their names and argument order. Old dogs know that this comes from early PHP being not much more than a thin wrapper around libc and various other C libraries.
Other than that, if you write modern PHP it's almost like Java, just without threads/concurrency in general, and without extremely braindead tooling required to get something built. PHP Composer is a breeze compared to Gradle, Maven and messing around with Tomcat, Glassfish and classpaths to get your application deployed...
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
I spend all of my working hours with modern PHP. IMHO, although its improved A LOT it’s still a mess. But with the right tooling you can kinda-sorta make it behave like a sane language if you squint a bit.
Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most Windows apps that are guilty of being slow and poorly made do not use the .NET you speak of at all. If they did they would work much better!
Do you have some examples of large and complex C# applications with really good performance? I’m hard pressed to think of any Microsoft software at all that I think feels really nice. Except for VSCode, which is of course built on Electron and not .NET. The only thing that comes to mind is Paint.NET, which doesn’t seem like all that big of an application. It’s very nicely done, but I think it’s only got like a single…
Devtoys is great and open-source and .NET and cross-platform * https://devtoys.app/
and in context to the thread files-community/files is great and open-source and .NET * https://files.community/ (its actually 96% .net and 3.1% c++)
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PHP 8 is a top notch language Maybe the things they've added lately have been well designed, but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? JavaScript has the same problem. They added `let` and `const` but never removed `var` or `==`. If you take a look at ESLint rules there are dozens of footguns that could have been fixed in the language. Not as bad as PHP's footguns, but still...
> but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4? If you have a background in C programming, most of the "wtf" is completely reasonable - the only thing "modern" and novice PHP programmers will still raise the WTF flag about is the standard library, mostly the string manipulation functions, their names and argument order. Old dogs know that this comes from early PHP being not much more than a thin wrapper around…
Then add in Laravel and chefs kiss.
Honestly 90% of web apps could be easily built with PHP, Laravel, Inertia and React/Vue in half the time.
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa. That's because you mention VB6 as a language. VB6 is not about the language, but about the platform and vertical integration; from the IDE to the app to the distribution. It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls. Or you could drag-drop a Web Browser component, and have a br…
> It was magical that dropping a telephony component into a form enabled the form to make phone calls the magic of COM[0]! But when it crashed it crashed hard. And the underlying programming model (beyond just using premade ones) are a bit hard to grok and fraught with footguns that shoot not only yourself, but the OS as well. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model
Dropping that little telephone icon on the form was designed to act like most of the other objects at your disposal, but it had an additional footgun all its own.
It depended on the existence of the RS-232 Communication Port object, MSCOMM32.OCX. Which often turned up missing :\
Plus unlike most of the other activex objects, mscomm32 had a certificate that was set to expire, and in only about 5 years, but loads of people never knew it until about 5 years later when it happened, and it's been a shitshow ever since Windows XP.
Just searched a bit and the situation may be looking up:
https://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?897698-MSCOMM32-OCX-...
You may still need to "locate" a suitable version of mscomm32.ocx since there are probably more expired versions in archives than there are acceptable files which will register properly.
This may be one, still referred to as a trick at the time:
https://github.com/davidanger/MSCOMM32
You may need to copy mscomm32.ocx to additional Windows folders and register the file there for different versions of Windows and/or Office too.
Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?
#110For no specific reason other than life random offers I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP), mostly as a case of "there is a lot of money being a decent programmer who can use these correctly". And there are three things I learned about it 1. There is a lot more money in it than you would think. The good part of "there is a lot of newbie using it" is that…
> I've gone through a few of those "dead and bad" reputational language in my career (VB6, Delphi, PHP) It's been ages since I've last seen Delphi in real life - must be over 20 years ago by now. But I'd not put PHP in the same league of "dead and bad" with it... yes, it's not the "hipster" language these days, that's been taken over by in frontend, NodeJS in the backend and Go for "need to quickly cobble something t…
Hipster JS frameworks are making the mistakes PHP and VBScript discovered 20 years ago.