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Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

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Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#131

Post by AlienRobot »

IshKebab wrote: post #86
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…

> 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...

It's not possible to remove anything without potentially breaking backwards compatibility. Removing ANYTHING in Javascript would be a tremendously bad idea.

If webpages from 30 years ago stopped working because 2025 developers favor aesthetics and disrespect legacy, I'd be pretty angry.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#132

Post by tonyedgecombe »

sgt wrote: post #94
fuzzfactor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't tried the File Explorer in W11 24H2 it turned into a complete joke overnight now. Slow as a dog and will often not render after all, compared to how it would act for decades up until less than a year ago. It's a new defect in relation to the video drivers, badly incompatible with the default Microsoft Standard Display Driver, so what can you say? I would expect that's an indication that XYplorer is a m…

Microsoft in 2024: why would you even need to manage your files?

Microsoft in 2024: No, you are not allowed to manage your files.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/micro...

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#133

Post by tonyedgecombe »

brokencode wrote: post #89
neonsunset wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

Isn't Visual Studio (not VSCode) written in .Net.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#134

Post by AlienRobot »

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 toyed with Lazarus a bit and I honestly think it's insane it's not more popular. Instant build times for GUI. You want to add a plugin? Press one button to recompile the entire IDE. You can recompile the IDE from GTK to Qt. With one button. I think I'd prefer it over Qt Creator, for example, for building GUIs on Linux.

The catch? I don't know Pascal, and there is no way to learn it. There are so many versions of Pascal that every tutorial you find will be about a different version. The GUI tutorials are for Borland Delphi, not Lazarus. There is no documentation or recipes for doing basic things, e.g. if you want to make a simple to do list CRUD that adds items to a list, you have no idea which widget is the correct list widget. Normally in this case you have a model-view list and a string list. Doing anything with lists that have columns is often a confusing nightmare, but and it becomes even more confusing with no documentation about it.

On the forums, the recommendation is to just press F1 in the source code editor to read the documentation for a function, but that doesn't help you when you have no idea what function you need to call, and you won't know it often. How do you append an item to an array, for example. How do you REMOVE an item. Is there a splice function? A remove function? Where are the dynamic arrays. Is there something like classes, and if not, how are you supposed to organize objects that you want to instantiate. How the lifetime of things work. Every time you ask "is this the correct way to do it using this tool?" you'll have no answers. How do you structure your project? It's completely different from how modern languages work and from how even C works.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#135

Post by pimeys »

moogly wrote: post #66
KetoManx64 wrote: post #7

I used XYPlorer for about 5-6 years until I made the switch to using Linux on all my machines last year. The scripting, speed, dual panes, customization, portability between machines (i used Syncthing to sync my configs between 3 machines) on XyPlorer are phenomenal and I've sadly not been able to find a Linux native file manager that's at the same level. Dolphin comes close but even with qdbus commands it sadly not…

If you thought going from XYplorer to what's available on Linux was bad, now try going from Directory Opus to what's available on Linux :/

Dolphin on Linux is very nice. It even can connect with ssh and SFTP. Best file manager I've used.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#136

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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).

> Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java

What do you mean? The time & date API in Java is excellent, and the float and double types follow the IEEE standard.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#137

Post by 1oooqooq »

unscaled wrote: post #46
chii wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

And COM/OLE/ActiveX components (whatever Microsoft fancied calling them that year) could have been used just as easily from Delphi. And you don't even need COM. You could do the same things today with RAD components in, say, Java. But it's just no longer a fad. Programmers nowadays don't think that dragging a component that makes phone calls and linking it to a button. Nowadays, they would just write "npm install tel…

because npm+electron is the vb3 of today

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#138

Post by rbanffy »

profsummergig wrote: post #19
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…

Even a tool like Frontpage was a game changer. Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML. No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.

It was, but it created some nightmare HTML that even FrontPage had trouble rendering.

We called it Don’tPage.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#139

Post by rbanffy »

cfn wrote: post #61
profsummergig wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a tool like Frontpage was a game changer. Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML. No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.

That's how I learned HTML, building the page in Frontpage and then looking at the markup. I don't remember it being free though.

It was very easy to get from the usual “alternative” software sources.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#140

Post by deergomoo »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #126
mschuster91 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There’s still tons of new projects being started in PHP. Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are massive and actively popular.
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