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Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

xyplorer.com

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Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#211

Post by IshKebab »

kgeist wrote: post #175
p_ing wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is PHP good for these days? What does it do better as a metric than any other language? It's easy to use, easy to get into for beginners, and is a requirement for WordPress. But performance? Flexibility? Some other random metric-word?

For me, 2 main advantages PHP has, for real production code, are: 1) Easy hotfixing/debugging on production servers. Just edit a file and save. Our teams which program in PHP solve blockers way faster than the Go teams. 2) "Shared nothing" architecture, which has two advantages: a) it's scalable without additional effort, because PHP processes are stateless b) better security, especially if you're doing multitenant S…

You can trivially do 2. in any language, although it is true that people rarely do that in other languages because of the downsides. As for live editing production... I dunno if that is a good thing!

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#212

Post by IshKebab »

AlienRobot wrote: post #184
IshKebab wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not possible to remove anything without potentially breaking backwards compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

>In sloppy mode, a number beginning with a 0, such as 0644, is interpreted as an octal number (0644 === 420) How does something like this even happens. Anyway, if you "use" strict mode, but the browser doesn't support it, you're effectively not running in strict mode, so you can't actually assume the Javascript will execute differently.

Any code that works in strict mode will also work in sloppy mode.

0777 style octal numbers are a footguns inherited from C. Don't ask my why they made that mistake! Modern languages use 0o777.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#213

Post by AdrianB1 »

odie5533 wrote: post #183
AdrianB1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is extremely simple to use. That makes it extremely simple to onboard new people and also to support. Complexity brings associated costs, sometimes bigger than the development itself.

Last time I created a Laravel app it created dozens of default files and folders for me. How is that simpler than Go/Gin or Python/Fastapi? When does the extremely simple part come in?

You don't have to use Laravel. If you want more advanced stuff to be built in, go for it, but I can write reasonably complex apps with plain PHP. How simple is it? I showed a DBA with no programming experience (other than SQL) to make a change in an existing app in ~ 2 hours. The change was a new feature in the app, about ~ 100 loc. I also gave a complete non-technical colleague a small PHP application to own and support and it works quite fine 2 years later.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#214

Post by ciupicri »

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.

MS Word / LibreOffice Writer → Save as… → HTML :-)

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#215

Post by KronisLV »

AlienRobot wrote: post #134
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 Pa…

This seems like a decent starting point: https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

> Why: There are many books and resources about Pascal out there, but too many of them talk about the old Pascal, without classes, units or generics. So I wrote this quick introduction to what I call modern Object Pascal.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#216

Post by divbzero »

IshKebab wrote: post #210
badlibrarian wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took nearly 20 years to sort it out. Before Java 8, January was 0 and getYear() for today would return 125.

January as 0 seems like a very definsible choice. Presumably they did it to match C. If anything the WTF there is that the day of the month doesn't start from 0. Dunno what's up with getYear() though!

getYear() must have been written in the 1990s during the early years of Java:

   95 = 1995
   96 = 1996
   97 = 1997
   98 = 1998
   99 = 1999
  100 = 2000 !?

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#217

Post by VB6-Programming »

gramie wrote: post #22
neverartful wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.

A dev tool with a monthly subscription? That's enough to stop me right there. An alternative is B4J, a free (as in beer) BASIC that compiles to Java, so should run just about anywhere. It also has * B4A - a free version for Android * B4R - a free version for Arduino and ESP8266 * B4I - a paid version for iOS The main (sole?) developer is ridiculously responsive and helpful.

twinBASIC programming has a free Community Edition.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#218

Post by tonyedgecombe »

AlienRobot wrote: post #182
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do like the way Rust has language editions which let you work around this, at least partially. Mostly though I don't care if we break old stuff. It happened all the time when developing for the desktop. People just dealt with it. The ones most impacted are lazy enterprises and I have no sympathy for them. Clinging on to the past stifles innovation.

The loss of being unable to access old information is unknowable and therefore infinite. People can't just "deal with it." Every year there is more technical baggage that someone new to the environment is just supposed to learn. At some point it becomes an impregnable barrier. If you start telling people they have to install an obsolete web browser, and then an obsolete operating system, and then patch the drivers be…

I think the cost is too high. If people want that information then they will find a way. If not then it probably wasn't that valuable.

The reality is that we have already given up in many areas, try and run a 16 bit Windows application on Windows 11, try and run a Node app you haven't updated for ten years, try and run early versions of OS/X and see how much internet dependent functionality has been lost, try and view an email with linked assets, try and run a web page with a Java or Flash applet.

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#219

Post by skirge »

wiseowise wrote: post #158
skirge wrote: post #50

I know that one of the best bug bounty hunter scripted his work using VB (unlike rest of the world who uses Python/Golang or Rust), if it works and you know it why not? Actually looking for perfect tools is procrastination.

Does he maintain a blog somewhere to read how he does it?

There's interview but no (too much) technical details: https://securitytrails.com/blog/interview-todayisnew

Re: Is XYplorer really written in VB6?

#220

Post by AlienRobot »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #218
AlienRobot wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The loss of being unable to access old information is unknowable and therefore infinite. People can't just "deal with it." Every year there is more technical baggage that someone new to the environment is just supposed to learn. At some point it becomes an impregnable barrier. If you start telling people they have to install an obsolete web browser, and then an obsolete operating system, and then patch the drivers be…

I think the cost is too high. If people want that information then they will find a way. If not then it probably wasn't that valuable. The reality is that we have already given up in many areas, try and run a 16 bit Windows application on Windows 11, try and run a Node app you haven't updated for ten years, try and run early versions of OS/X and see how much internet dependent functionality has been lost, try and vie…

The only people who can find a way are technical people. The average person can't do it.

And we can't tell how valuable it is because we don't know what we are losing.

If we burn down the Library of Alexandria, was there anything valuable in there? We don't know, because it's all burned. It's inaccessible. It's too much stuff to verify before doing it, and we can't tell after we do it, so I'd rather we don't burn down the whole thing since we don't know what's inside.

And every time it does happen, it's a massive loss.

You have no idea how much I grief the fact flash games are no longer a thing. If newgrounds still had flash today, the Internet would be a much better place.

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