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Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

xyplorer.com

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Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#121

Post by jeroenhd »

alexvitkov wrote: post #84
silisili wrote: post #13

VB3 was my first real intro to programming. Well, I started with C++ but abandoned it as an impatient child as describing a window in code wasn't fun. I wish we had a new drag and drop WYSIWYG to get people interested. Put Python or Go or even Basic behind it. QT maybe? Heck make it Electron. I'm not sure I would be where I am today without VB having existed, and it's a shame kids today don't have the same tools avai…

We've forgotten how to do it - the idea of dragging a button offends our modern sensibilities. You can't just drag a button, what about the layout?! What about responsive design, how will it look on a 300x200 screen and a 8k one? What about scaling? Reactivity?

Visual Studio's form editor had decent solutions for that. And most application developers don't care about tiny or huge screens anyway, applications will just be broken if you resize them too much. The software stack they're using should allow them to make the design work on any form factor and resolution, but most of the time nobody cares about those edge cases.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#122

Post by integricho »

silisili wrote: post #13

VB3 was my first real intro to programming. Well, I started with C++ but abandoned it as an impatient child as describing a window in code wasn't fun. I wish we had a new drag and drop WYSIWYG to get people interested. Put Python or Go or even Basic behind it. QT maybe? Heck make it Electron. I'm not sure I would be where I am today without VB having existed, and it's a shame kids today don't have the same tools avai…

The Delphi ecosystem was similarly good back in the day. Today, the Lazarus IDE is considered as a spiritual successor to it, and it indeed has all the bells and whistles, drag and drop a UI quickly together, build a standalone EXE in a single click (not a single DLL dependency - not counting win32), just a wonderful experience.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#123

Post by networked »

IshKebab wrote: post #113
dalemhurley wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).

Every single language has parts that are a mess, or at least not perfectly designed. But that doesn't mean that languages all have an equal amount of mess. Python clearly has less mess than Perl. Rust clearly has less mess than C++. Zig clearly has less mess than C. There should be a name for the "nothing is perfect so everything is equally bad" fallacy. It's surprisingly common.

The fallacy of gray?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fal...

> The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”

> The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”

> —Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#124

Post by guenthert »

IshKebab wrote: post #113
dalemhurley wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).

Every single language has parts that are a mess, or at least not perfectly designed. But that doesn't mean that languages all have an equal amount of mess. Python clearly has less mess than Perl. Rust clearly has less mess than C++. Zig clearly has less mess than C. There should be a name for the "nothing is perfect so everything is equally bad" fallacy. It's surprisingly common.

> There should be a name for the "nothing is perfect so everything is equally bad" fallacy. It's surprisingly common.

I think this falls under splitting (black-and-white thinking), a form of defense mechanism or (I suspect) mere rhetorical tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white_thinking

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#125

Post by desdenova »

dalemhurley wrote: post #106
stefanfisk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Taking two of the worst languages as an example of "every single language" doesn't really work.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#126

Post by tonyedgecombe »

mschuster91 wrote: post #103
nolok wrote: post #74

For 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…

>But I'd not put PHP in the same league of "dead and bad" with it.

It's dead to the extent that you are unlikely to start a new project in it but I wouldn't classify it as bad. It's just of it's time.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#127

Post by kijin »

mschuster91 wrote: post #103
nolok wrote: post #74

For 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…

The great thing about working with a non-hipster language or framework is that everything is incredibly stable. There's no need to worry about the latest update breaking something, or argue about which design pattern is more correct. All the tooling has been battle-tested for 10 years and will be supported for another 10 years. You just follow established best practices, build things, ship them, and focus on business.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#128

Post by summarity »

Can't mention VB6 without one of the biggest archives of source-available software for it: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code

On the topic of "wait what that's VB6", here's an entire 3D modeling and rendering suite in pure VB6: https://github.com/Planet-Source-Code/kaci-lounes-a-3d-digit...

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#129

Post by tonyedgecombe »

chii wrote: post #41
jeswin wrote: post #37

Earlier 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

I had a client with a C++ application that used COM for everything. They wouldn't write a simple C++ class or structure but rather would always fire up the wizard in Visual Studio to create a COM object. It was horrendous.

Having said that COM itself wasn't that bad. If you read the Don Box book he justifies pretty much all the technical decisions they made.

In the end my productivity doubled when I shifted from C++/COM to C#/.Net.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#130

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pryelluw wrote: post #4
andsoitis wrote: post #3

I recently discovered Remobjects and their development tools. Amongst other things, they create Mercury, with they describe as a modern Visual Basic that can compile for: - .Net - JVM - Android (JDK and NDK) - iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS - Windows - Linux - WebAssembly https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/

Feels weird to pay for this. I’m definitely spoiled by open source tooling.

I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand it's great that people can write software without any financial friction, on the other I think developers should be rewarded for their work and I have little doubt the remote objects tools wouldn't exist without some kind of commercial reward.
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