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 there is a lot of newbie using it and tons of software in it out there, and once you prove you know what you're doing you drown in high paid work, and with a bit of job selection it's not the bad horrible maintenance kind but decent fun too.
2. There is no need trying to argue with people about it online or whatever. You're not going to convince anyone they're better language than they think. PHP 8 is a top notch language and people are still dumping on it using php 4 things.
3. Ultimately there are people who spend their time talking about what language is right and people who get things done, build something great and it doesn't matter if it's cpp or Javascript or whatever. So at the end of day I've made a fair bit of money improving or building stuff used by lots of people to generate tons of revenue, and everyone involved is happy about it.
IshKebab 4 hours ago [-]
> 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...
deergomoo 10 minutes ago [-]
> but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4
Depends what you class as a WTF. The older parts of the standard library are still wildly inconsistent in function naming and argument order, but that’s never going to change because it’s simply not worth the BC break.
But they’ve done a good job cleaning up the actually problematic bits of the language. Previous horribly insecure defaults like register_globals and magic quotes are long gone. And in recent years they’ve worked on tightening things up: many obviously incorrect behaviours have been promoted from notices or warnings to outright errors.
stefanfisk 3 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 6 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
dalemhurley 3 hours ago [-]
Every single language is a mess. Just look at time and floating point numbers in Java (not having a go at Java).
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
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 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
IshKebab 14 minutes ago [-]
Ah nice, thanks!
guenthert 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
> 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.
DanielHB 2 hours ago [-]
There are lasting languages and good languages, but there are no lasting good languages.
desdenova 1 hours ago [-]
Taking two of the worst languages as an example of "every single language" doesn't really work.
AlienRobot 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 13 minutes ago [-]
> It's not possible to remove anything without potentially breaking backwards compatibility
> 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...
dalemhurley 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jeroenhd 2 hours ago [-]
Delphi is a funny one. Delphi applications certainly have a certain feel (and often instability) with them, but thanks to everything being a website now, they're incredibly fast and responsive compared to what we have now. Sure, they don't do fancy transitions and they look like someone wrote a Windows 8 theme for Windows 95, but when they work, they work.
AlienRobot 47 minutes ago [-]
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.
mschuster91 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 <insert JS framework of the day> 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.
dalemhurley 2 hours ago [-]
Hipster JS frameworks are making the mistakes PHP and VBScript discovered 20 years ago.
tonyedgecombe 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
deergomoo 20 minutes ago [-]
There’s still tons of new projects being started in PHP. Frameworks like Laravel and Symfony are massive and actively popular.
tonyedgecombe 8 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
kijin 1 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 18 minutes ago [-]
VB was the he first viable way to easily tap the “business programmer” who was writing code in Clipper for building competent-looking GUI applications. Along with Windows for Workgroups, it was a game changer for Windows in small businesses who could now afford bespoke Windows applications.
Other options all had their quirks that made their apps look out of place on Windows. It was easy to say an app was built with Delphi or FoxPro. VB apps just looked like Microsoft apps and felt perfectly at home.
I remember how easy it was to even get the 3D look popularised by Office in VB apps.
darekkay 5 hours ago [-]
I've been using XYplorer for 10 years now and it's fantastic. There are just so many features and quality of life improvements over the Windows explorer.
It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little.
I think VB is totally fine. It's a pragmatic solution to a real problem, and the ugliest things about it today are all a product of hindsight.
On the other hand, this rubs me the wrong way:
> So, wouldn’t it be logical to conclude: If such an application can be written in VB6 then VB6 cannot be that bad after all?
Yes, it absolutely could be bad. Our industry consists, in no small part, of turd polishing. Plenty of good software is written in bad (or ill-fitted) languages, and vice versa.
jeswin 6 hours ago [-]
> 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 browser inside your app. Or a database component, and a thousand other things. Few of these required reading the docs.
There are many apps that can be written (and deployed!) faster in legacy VB than with anything available today.
chii 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
unscaled 5 hours ago [-]
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 telephony" and then add a couple of lines that they got from the README.md on GitHub (or from their AI assistant) to make a call:
import { Dialer } from "telephony";
const dialer = new Dialer();
dialer.call("+1 800 1234 1234");
robocat 3 hours ago [-]
> And COM/OLE/ActiveX components [] could have been used just as easily from Delphi
I wanted to use Excel from within Delphi - I wasted more than a few weeks and ultimately failed. I always suspected that the COM/OLE integration had problems with some of the advanced features I was trying to use (I was trying to do something rather complicated). Plus the documentation and support was lacking for Delphi - Microsoft best supports Microsoft tools. I did use Delphi and COM successfully in many other situations but that one failure really soured me towards COM and Delphi together. I am typically capable of making complex integrations work, so I was surprised to fail.
chii 5 hours ago [-]
The way COM model worked, is that an application (for example, microsoft word) would implement this COM interface (that they'd have to anyway, for various reasons such as interoperability), and it would become available as a component to be used in another application.
It's a grandiose vision. It just didnt work out because of how complicated it is in practise to implement the COM interface(s), and not enough apps did it anyway.
It is slightly different from a library, since that library would have to be useable from your language (or have some sort of FFI mechanism).
agarren 4 hours ago [-]
It was (is) an ABI, more stable than something available through a C/C++ compiler. It’s been years since I’ve lived in a Windows world, but as I understand it, it’s still very much alive and well. It didn’t fail because it was complicated, although it was, but it continued to evolve and was eventually superseded by .net. I worked with win32 & mfc quite a bit and had to interface with Com/activex a little, usually through wrappers of some kind, but it was always under the covers. I also wouldn’t say that it failed because not enough apps did it. I can’t speak to drivers or system components, but if you were distributing windows apps prior to and early into .net, you dealt with com directly or indirectly.
Joker_vD 4 hours ago [-]
I personally think one of the main design problems of COM was that, ironically (given its name), it never really had "component" as a first-class concept. It was all about interfaces, and the rules on how implementation of IUnknown's QueryInterface must behave really highlight that: it's almost impossible to delegate to/compose over another component if that component was not written with this scenario in mind.
And it’s nowhere near these neat 3 lines. Same for ui.
I agree that the spirit of VB/Delphi is in theory easily transferrable to any modern runtime. But in practice we suck at it and there’s nothing even remotely close to just dropping a component on a form. All we have is miles of vaguely explained boilerplate and the most convoluted idioms that don’t connect. The basic technology is lost and only miraculously exists as a windows support artifact.
1oooqooq 35 minutes ago [-]
because npm+electron is the vb3 of today
fuzzfactor 2 hours ago [-]
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:
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:
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.
Zardoz84 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried Gambas, or the current version of Delphi ?
unscaled 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with your conclusion, but when you say "VB is totally fine" do you mean VB6?
I can get Modern iterations of Visual Basic such as VB.Net. The syntax and semantics hurt my eye and my brain, but if that's your thing, yeah the language is very serviceable. It's a modern language with modern features and a lot of legacy baggage. It's not worse than PHP or maybe even JavaScript (though I would much prefer JavaScript).
But VB6 means taking the language and tooling as they were in 1998, frozen in time, and writing a modern application to a modern user base.
Kwpolska 3 hours ago [-]
Microsoft considers VB.NET legacy as well. Most notably, ASP.NET Core applications cannot be written in VB6 due to missing language features.
self_awareness 5 hours ago [-]
Could you specify what legacy baggage you would like to eliminate, and what modern features you miss in VB6?
gus_massa 2 hours ago [-]
I still have a VB6 program in production. I miss a nice `sort` function.
Also opening the standard window to open/save a file is a missing feature. You can use a vbx control but it's difficult to distribute, or you can use the API, but the null characters are a small problem.
jcncncn 5 hours ago [-]
The author has listed quite a few like unicode and 64 bit support ^^
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.
throwaway06544 3 hours ago [-]
Lazarus has been around for years, but people don't know about it.
"What is Lazarus?
Lazarus is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you create visual (GUI) and non-visual Object Pascal programs, and uses the Free Pascal compiler to generate your executable. Its aim is write once, compile anywhere: you should be able to just recompile your program source code with Lazarus running on another operating system (or a cross compiler) and get a program that runs on that operating system."
jeroenhd 2 hours ago [-]
Windows still has Windows Forms with C#. Download Visual Studio Community edition for free (not VSCode), create a new forms project, and you'll have a GUI in minutes. Even beats VB6 in areas like automatic resizing because it has better docking support. It'll only target Microsoft's proprietary .NET but because Mono has supported that forever, you can run those applications anywhere Mono exists.
There are also tools like Gambas and Gnome Builder that'll let you drag and drop UI components, but I find the software designed to run on Linux kind of lacking in comparison.
profsummergig 9 hours ago [-]
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.
kragen 4 hours ago [-]
There are too many to count. WordPress, MediaWiki (on Fandom or Miraheze if you want), Mastodon, Blogger (you can still sign up apparently), Twitter, Linktree, Facebook, Google Docs, Google Drive, GitHub Gists in Markdown, ...
I went to a restaurant last night that had QR codes instead of a menu. The QR code took you to their Linktree, which linked to some PDFs on Google Drive. You could criticize that for looking unprofessional, but it sure looked better than a Frontpage site.
The other day I went looking for information on a neighborhood business that's a bit cagey about saying what they do. Their website (built by a consultancy that charges US$450, according to the Wayback Machine) seems to have been online from 02013 to 02018, but they have active pages on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which apparently is good enough for them. (It turns out to be a school for mentally disabled teenagers, if I've interpreted the multiple layers of euphemisms correctly.)
So the niche of "build a web page for free without learning HTML" where Frontpage and GeoCities followed NaviPress is not just not dead; it's thriving.
rbanffy 23 minutes ago [-]
It was, but it created some nightmare HTML that even FrontPage had trouble rendering.
We called it Don’tPage.
6 hours ago [-]
d1sxeyes 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you mean by “no free tool does that today”, there are plenty of free site builders out there, both on the web and desktop apps. Even more if you consider “freemium” site builders.
cfn 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 23 minutes ago [-]
It was very easy to get from the usual “alternative” software sources.
alexvitkov 4 hours ago [-]
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?
trinix912 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and most of these problems can be very well mitigated by just implementing some sort of a layout constraint system. Xcode does it (AutoLayout), however, it's not nearly as pleasant and straightforward to use as the old VB form designer.
jeroenhd 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 20 minutes ago [-]
And even then, UI designers worked on abstract units and changing screen density changed the size of the elements (if you used bitmaps you would suffer, but that would be on you). VB6 paid for my first apartment in Brazil.
yard2010 5 hours ago [-]
First language I've learned. I remember the visual window editor was something so special, I didn't have to code the windows which was good because English was basically Chinese to my eyes at that age.
bragr 7 hours ago [-]
You can use Cambalache [1] to create GTK4 based GUIs (comparable to Glade for older versions of GTK).
>A security issue has been identified that could compromise your Windows-based system running Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6
>The Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008, however, the Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications
The installer was originally digitally signed with a sha1 certificate. The sha1 certificate with replaced with sha256 on 3/23/2021.
KetoManx64 10 hours ago [-]
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 as customizable as XYPlorer. I think it's the one thing I miss the most about Windows.
captn3m0 9 hours ago [-]
My one thing was “Everything by Voidtools”. It piggy backed on the NTFS index, something no tool does for Linux-native filesystems.
Does XYPlorer work with Wine?
forgotpwd16 5 hours ago [-]
>Linux-native filesystems
Because they lack something (for worse or better depending on one's requirements) equivalent to NTFS' MFT & USN Journal. Closest is building own file db by first-time full scan and then updating via fanotify/inotify. This is what FSearch tool does.
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:
Yes, Remobjects makes some nice tools. I absolutely adore their Oxygene language.
dr_kiszonka 7 hours ago [-]
Is there any documentation or tutorial on how to create a cross platform mobile app using any of their languages? The value proposition is great, but I can't find any actual code.
pryelluw 10 hours ago [-]
Feels weird to pay for this. I’m definitely spoiled by open source tooling.
tonyedgecombe 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
benatkin 10 hours ago [-]
With Moonbit and Wolfram Language, it feels like a renaissance of paid programming languages.
forgotpwd16 5 hours ago [-]
Wolfram ie Mathematica language predates VB1. Being commercial was the norm back then, and due to its academia widespread use has remained as such.
5 hours ago [-]
VB6-Programming 3 days ago [-]
The 64 bit version of XYplorer is written in the twinBASIC programming language (actually an import of the VB6 source code and forms).
neverartful 9 hours ago [-]
This is the first I've heard of twinBASIC. I'm happy to see it on the dev tools scene.
gramie 8 hours ago [-]
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.
forgotpwd16 5 hours ago [-]
>A dev tool with a monthly subscription?
It seems that can buy a perpetual license for GBP £5000 / developer, which is equal to 16 years of monthly subscription (quite optimistic for a 3yo project).
wilg 6 hours ago [-]
it seems pretty reasonable to charge $30-50 a month for somebody doing the hero's work of reimplementing and building on top of a 30 year old programming environment. also there's a free one! spray money the people who do crazy niche work! that's what makes the world beautiful!
jimnotgym 4 hours ago [-]
Never heard of this before. I'm always happy to hear of new attempts to replace vb6, and a backwards compatible one is such an achievement
rkagerer 8 hours ago [-]
Works on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11
That's better than you can say for a lot of software these days
nolok 4 hours ago [-]
It's a feature of limiting yourself to the win32 api (and functions of it available since 2001 only).
Eg the moment you need to deal with security like certificate or whatever this goes out the window.
pyeri 10 hours ago [-]
Both VB6 and FreePascal/Delphi are highly capable tools even in today's context, they just need more marketing.
unscaled 6 hours ago [-]
FreePascal/Delphi and VB6 are entirely different beasts. For one, FreePascal and Delphi are still under development. Delphi had the following language features added since 1998 (this is just a small selection):
Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (removing Pascal's limitation), type inference, multiline strings.
Besides all of this, modern Delphi can compile code for Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Android and iOS. It seems like there's even a cross-platform library for writing apps that can run on both Mobile and Desktop called FireMonkey.
VB6, on the other hand, is a language frozen in time. It never supported any other platform than 32-bit Windows[2]. It only really works on the new Microsoft Surface Laptops thanks to emulation, but I can also run Nintendo 8-bit games on a Surface Pro 11 using an emulator — that doesn't say much.
Unicode support is also a mess. VB6 always used Unicode internally, but this was implementing during the UCS-2 heyday (so you need hacks to use Emoji for instance). Worse yet, is that VB6 was never really designed to run natively on Windows NT, so it's mostly using using the XxxYyyA family of APIs instead of the XxxYyyW family of APIs. This means that you can only display text in a non-English writing if your system's ANSI codpeage is set to that language (in the past you had to restart Windows to change this, not sure if it has improved). To make things worse, some languages (from countries that were too pair to get ANSI pages in Microsoft during the 1990s). So no Ethiopian languages or Mongolian as the author claims. Windows ANSI codpeages also do not "fully support" Japanese and Chinese as the author claims. Over the years the governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have updated their national standards (which defined tables of characters that should be digitally encodable) and introduced more characters that were previously not mapped. These characters were not new or fake[3] — they were just less common, but still in use. All of these various government standards (like JIS X 0213, GB 18030, Big5-2003) got quickly incorporated into newer versions of Unicode, but the Windows ANSI codepages stagnated and they don't support some of the characters in these codepages. I'm not sure how it's going to affect VB6, but I'm pretty sure that some Unicode CJK characters would just not map into ANSI and would not be displayed even if your system code page is set correctly.
With all of these things considered, no developer who cares about their users should choose VB6 for writing a modern app. I'd also argue that no developer who cares about themselves would do that. VB6 wasn't a great language to begin with. It was better than VB3, but it was still inferior to Delphi even when it was out. Customizing the UI beyond the basics, often needed custom ActiveX components written in C++ or messing around with a lot of raw Windows API calls. Error handling was very painful too. It was never a great developer experience even back of the day if you wanted to do anything beyond the basics.
---
[1] To be fair, Borland's Pascal dialects had value types support since they've implemented object oriented programming (that came in either Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0, I don't exactly remember). Turbo Pascal "objects" could be put on the stack or as pointers like in C++. They even had destructors that would be invoked automatically when the object went out-of-scope, again like C++'s RAII. But the old "objects" kinda botched polymorphism (I don't even remember the details), so when Delphi came out they've been replaced with "classes" that are Reference-only (like Java, but initially without any form of automatic memory management).
[2] VBA was originally ported to Mac, but it is not exactly the same language, lacks the GUI designer and can't run most VB6 apps
Delphi pricing is USD1400 for the developer edition and they are corporately mercenary chasing their payment. In 1996 Delphi 2 was released at USD500 for the cheapest Desktop version (which is ==USD1000 accounting CPI). Edit: I converted from NZD to get the USD1400 figure - the actual USD cost will be less in USD without our GST/VAT.
ianhawes 9 hours ago [-]
> VB6 highly capable
> VB6 only available in 32-bit
trinix912 3 hours ago [-]
I really don't see how this invalidates the statement, regarding that VB's primary domain is rapid CRUD application development. Those applications usually don't use >2GBs of RAM, at least from what I've seen working on several old ones written in VB6, Delphi, PowerBuilder... Is a 64-bit Electron CRUD app that much more capable/better in getting the job done than a 32-bit VB6 equivalent? Both are merely an SQL client in the end.
mardifoufs 8 hours ago [-]
Delphi, maybe, sure. But starting a new project with vb6 is just weird unless it's the only language someone is familiar with. It's a dead end, even on the only platform where it makes sense to use it.
_blk 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I used VB5 as one of my first languages and today did half a day of VBA. Definitely enough to quickly make me want to raise my hourly rate. Esp. in that office macro editor.
Btw and totally unrelated office can now interpret VBA, (office)TypeScript and Python. Did I miss any?
actuallyalys 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think being written in VB6 is actually a good reason not to use XYPlorer, which seems like a capable tool, but this page doesn't seem really reassuring? What would reassure me is knowing that there is a maintained version of VB6 for modern systems. Luckily, there apparently is such an implementation, twinBasic, and they are already using it for 64-bit releases.
qwertox 5 hours ago [-]
> No multi-threading. A pity. But for a file manager not that important.
It's honestly blazingly fast in comparison to Windows Explorer on Windows 11.
fuzzfactor 4 hours ago [-]
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 much more advanced, well-developed and mature alternative not relying on flaky emerging APIs that have too few decades of reliability to compare.
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
Microsoft in 2024: why would you even need to manage your files?
tonyedgecombe 54 minutes ago [-]
Microsoft in 2024: No, you are not allowed to manage your files.
As much as I like C# the language, I honestly think that it and .NET are fundamentally flawed when it comes to performance.
Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great. It’s kind of crazy how much better the basic OS apps feel in macOS compared to Windows.
I wish Microsoft would have gone in a direction more similar to Apple, with an AOT compilation and reference counting.
JIT and garbage collection sound great in theory, but in practice I’ve found them both to be loaded with footguns that more than eliminate any benefits. At least with .NET, that is.
Kwpolska 3 hours ago [-]
Most applications that ship with Windows are not written in C#/.NET. Microsoft tried to rewrite everything this way around Vista, but they failed hard due to stability and performance issues. In Windows 11/Server 2025, the only things written in .NET are administrative tools, like most MMC snap-ins (e.g. Event Viewer), Virtual Machine Connection, or Server Manager.
neonsunset 2 hours ago [-]
To be fair, .NET back then was just not where it is today. And the C++ faction within Microsoft did not help that either.
But a lot of people are completely out of touch, thinking something along the lines of "Clearly Golang is managed by YouTube and Google Search teams" except about .NET whenever complaining about whatever happens to Windows nowadays.
sedatk 4 hours ago [-]
.NET supports native AOT for a while now.
brokencode 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t have a lot of experience with this, but that’s mainly because there’s no way to compile my company’s application with Native AOT. At least not without a significant amount of work.
This is because there are many limitations in what can be compiled this way, and most C# applications and libraries were never built with such limitations in mind.
neonsunset 4 hours ago [-]
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!
brokencode 4 hours ago [-]
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 dev working on it, so couldn’t be that big.
dagaci 3 hours ago [-]
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++)
tonyedgecombe 51 minutes ago [-]
Isn't Visual Studio (not VSCode) written in .Net.
neonsunset 2 hours ago [-]
> Do you have some examples of large and complex C# applications with really good performance?
Most of them. An implementation would have to go out of its way to make itself perform poorly if it is built on top of, say, .NET 8.
Have you heard of Ryujinx? Or Nethermind? Or Garnet? Or have you seen that .NET's Regex engine, written in pure C#, is the third fastest in the world after Intel's Hyperscan and Rust's Regex crate?
tombert 10 hours ago [-]
I debated writing an app in ColdFusion (well OpenBluedragon or Railo or something) about a year ago, partly out of curiosity to how well it holds up, but mostly out of sentimentality for the language. I had a bit of trouble getting started, and eventually the project morphed less into web and more into data-processing so I ended up using Java, but I still occasionally get the urge to write using a “dead” language.
pantulis 2 hours ago [-]
I think it was Joel Spolsky who said that the sweet spot with VB was throwing seasoned C++ programmers at it, and that became a huge productivity boost to the teams. I think this goes to say that the bad name of VB6 is due to its lower entry barrier, which made it easy for beginner devs to deliver terrible software.
p0w3n3d 7 hours ago [-]
Back in 1999 for me most important was to have a great gui design, and VB was cool for this. Then later I would focus on native binary, performance and size of the build hence I switched to Delphi and then to C++. But tbh nowadays I can see that this is this famous triangle: either good and fast but expensive, either fast and cheap but not good, or good and cheap but not fast. So instead of writing in C++ i coded in 2 days a tray helper in pyside. I have no longer size complexes, as other apps tend to be written in electron nowadays, which is super size XXL
The point is: prejudice is bad. Use whatever floats your boat
nasretdinov 5 hours ago [-]
Please use float64 for your boat though
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
While VB.NET 1.0 had indeed lots of compatibility issues with VB 6, most of them were fixed in later versions, so I wonder why not at least VB on .NET Framework (Core brings quite a few compatibility issues)
I do know VB since VB 3.0 days, did quite a couple of VB 6 to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C# portings, so it isn't like I don't know the subject.
jonatron 4 hours ago [-]
I know someone that still has a VB6 job. It's apparently repetitive and they haven't had a new client for many years, but I guess it'll continue until their clients don't need the software.
Your 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.
zvrba 3 hours ago [-]
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.
skirge 5 hours ago [-]
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.
aquir 5 hours ago [-]
It is a great software, now I know why there is no MacOS builds :)
RajT88 10 hours ago [-]
Early in my career, I worked in support for a company which made developer tooling.
Male programmers would call in and do a bit of intro so you knew they were not dumb, just busy.
VB6 programmers would say things like "I am a very senior VB developer". They were the only "very senior" programmers who did not seem to understand things about OS stuff. Like exported functions and their different calling conventions, why you need to "register" COM .dlls, environment blocks, handles, etc.
flomo 8 hours ago [-]
Point taken that VB was a programming ghetto. But the actual seniors were fighting the language to call Win32, writing MTS servers, and etc, they 'got' all that stuff.
I did some VBS ASP back in the day (not VB), and the language was more just annoying, at least partially due to the BASIC legacy stuff. Like it didn't even have a hashmap, you had to import something from Internet Explorer.
treve 8 hours ago [-]
I feel this narrative about less experienced developers probably made sense to you back then, but it might be time to update it!
j16sdiz 8 hours ago [-]
> They were the only "very senior" programmers...
Don't forget nodejs.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
Really? I feel like those of us maintaining PHP stacks are much more "senior" by now...
peteforde 4 hours ago [-]
In the late 90s, I was a member of Microsoft's MVP program for VB6 and later IIS/ASP. Having used every version of VB (including DOS) I was one of the many who was furious when they petulantly refused to commit to updating VB6 on a parallel track. At one point there was a significant number of us with a petition, and they basically told us to pound sand...
So, I did. This was literally the push I needed to switch to open source tooling, and it put me in the right time and place to be a Rails early adopter.
I downloaded XYplorer mostly out of curiousity, and it's actually so fast that I am slightly shocked to say that I might be switching to it.
gdgghhhhh 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder how the code looks, it must be a maze of "on error goto" lines to not crash at the slightest error.
Deeg9rie9usi 4 hours ago [-]
The person that has down voted this doesn't seem to know that error handling in VB6 works like that. Most functions don't return an error code you can check, neither are exceptions available.
gdgghhhhh 5 hours ago [-]
The program doesn't look like a typical VB6 application, I guess the author draws all UI elements himself?
wiseowise 6 hours ago [-]
I always love a story of impressive software written in “underdog” languages and not hype Go, Rust, Zig etc.
chii 6 hours ago [-]
these rare stories are rare, because the creators of these software aren't bragging about which platform they're using, and merely focus on the software!
stef-13013 4 hours ago [-]
It does the job, so "Who Cares?"
ltbarcly3 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry VB apologists, it's a weird language with lots of legacy weirdness. If you chuckle at silly things in JS, you'll cry when you learn VB.
giancarlostoro 9 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has open sourced so much, I wish they would work on an effort to fully open source VB6 at least the bits they fully own and control. I have a feeling the community might rally to fill in the gaps, even if its over a few years.
I mean, look at EverQuest Online, insanely old MMO client, still has people building private servers, and even clients.
29athrowaway 7 hours ago [-]
You can use GAMBAS as a replacement.
draw_down 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
benatkin 10 hours ago [-]
They should have written Dogecoin in VB, then it would have been even sillier.
Rendered at 12:54:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 there is a lot of newbie using it and tons of software in it out there, and once you prove you know what you're doing you drown in high paid work, and with a bit of job selection it's not the bad horrible maintenance kind but decent fun too.
2. There is no need trying to argue with people about it online or whatever. You're not going to convince anyone they're better language than they think. PHP 8 is a top notch language and people are still dumping on it using php 4 things.
3. Ultimately there are people who spend their time talking about what language is right and people who get things done, build something great and it doesn't matter if it's cpp or Javascript or whatever. So at the end of day I've made a fair bit of money improving or building stuff used by lots of people to generate tons of revenue, and everyone involved is happy about it.
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...
Depends what you class as a WTF. The older parts of the standard library are still wildly inconsistent in function naming and argument order, but that’s never going to change because it’s simply not worth the BC break.
But they’ve done a good job cleaning up the actually problematic bits of the language. Previous horribly insecure defaults like register_globals and magic quotes are long gone. And in recent years they’ve worked on tightening things up: many obviously incorrect behaviours have been promoted from notices or warnings to outright errors.
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.
There should be a name for the "nothing is perfect so everything is equally bad" fallacy. It's surprisingly common.
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
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
What do you mean? The time & date API in Java is excellent, and the float and double types follow the IEEE standard.
If webpages from 30 years ago stopped working because 2025 developers favor aesthetics and disrespect legacy, I'd be pretty angry.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
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...
Honestly 90% of web apps could be easily built with PHP, Laravel, Inertia and React/Vue in half the time.
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.
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 <insert JS framework of the day> 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.
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.
Other options all had their quirks that made their apps look out of place on Windows. It was easy to say an app was built with Delphi or FoxPro. VB apps just looked like Microsoft apps and felt perfectly at home.
I remember how easy it was to even get the 3D look popularised by Office in VB apps.
It's written by a single person, and they're very responsive. I've recently reported a bug with the search (the first that I've noticed in all those years), and it's been fixed within a day. I'm only worried about the bus factor a little.
I have a GitHub repo with some of my settings/scripts/notes for XYplorer if someone's interested: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...
On the other hand, this rubs me the wrong way:
> So, wouldn’t it be logical to conclude: If such an application can be written in VB6 then VB6 cannot be that bad after all?
Yes, it absolutely could be bad. Our industry consists, in no small part, of turd polishing. 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 browser inside your app. Or a database component, and a thousand other things. Few of these required reading the docs.
There are many apps that can be written (and deployed!) faster in legacy VB than with anything available today.
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
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.
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 telephony" and then add a couple of lines that they got from the README.md on GitHub (or from their AI assistant) to make a call:
I wanted to use Excel from within Delphi - I wasted more than a few weeks and ultimately failed. I always suspected that the COM/OLE integration had problems with some of the advanced features I was trying to use (I was trying to do something rather complicated). Plus the documentation and support was lacking for Delphi - Microsoft best supports Microsoft tools. I did use Delphi and COM successfully in many other situations but that one failure really soured me towards COM and Delphi together. I am typically capable of making complex integrations work, so I was surprised to fail.
It's a grandiose vision. It just didnt work out because of how complicated it is in practise to implement the COM interface(s), and not enough apps did it anyway.
It is slightly different from a library, since that library would have to be useable from your language (or have some sort of FFI mechanism).
https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-telephony
And it’s nowhere near these neat 3 lines. Same for ui.
I agree that the spirit of VB/Delphi is in theory easily transferrable to any modern runtime. But in practice we suck at it and there’s nothing even remotely close to just dropping a component on a form. All we have is miles of vaguely explained boilerplate and the most convoluted idioms that don’t connect. The basic technology is lost and only miraculously exists as a windows support artifact.
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.
I can get Modern iterations of Visual Basic such as VB.Net. The syntax and semantics hurt my eye and my brain, but if that's your thing, yeah the language is very serviceable. It's a modern language with modern features and a lot of legacy baggage. It's not worse than PHP or maybe even JavaScript (though I would much prefer JavaScript).
But VB6 means taking the language and tooling as they were in 1998, frozen in time, and writing a modern application to a modern user base.
Also opening the standard window to open/save a file is a missing feature. You can use a vbx control but it's difficult to distribute, or you can use the API, but the null characters are a small problem.
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...
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 available.
[1] https://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html#
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
"What is Lazarus? Lazarus is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you create visual (GUI) and non-visual Object Pascal programs, and uses the Free Pascal compiler to generate your executable. Its aim is write once, compile anywhere: you should be able to just recompile your program source code with Lazarus running on another operating system (or a cross compiler) and get a program that runs on that operating system."
There are also tools like Gambas and Gnome Builder that'll let you drag and drop UI components, but I find the software designed to run on Linux kind of lacking in comparison.
Simple website in a minute without any need to know HTML.
No free tool that does that today. Dreamweaver does, but it's paid.
I went to a restaurant last night that had QR codes instead of a menu. The QR code took you to their Linktree, which linked to some PDFs on Google Drive. You could criticize that for looking unprofessional, but it sure looked better than a Frontpage site.
The other day I went looking for information on a neighborhood business that's a bit cagey about saying what they do. Their website (built by a consultancy that charges US$450, according to the Wayback Machine) seems to have been online from 02013 to 02018, but they have active pages on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which apparently is good enough for them. (It turns out to be a school for mentally disabled teenagers, if I've interpreted the multiple layers of euphemisms correctly.)
So the niche of "build a web page for free without learning HTML" where Frontpage and GeoCities followed NaviPress is not just not dead; it's thriving.
We called it Don’tPage.
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/jpu/cambalache
I'd say security is a problem if one uses a 30 year old piece of software but apparently Microsoft still releases security updates: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=507...
>A security issue has been identified that could compromise your Windows-based system running Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Service Pack 6
>The Visual Basic 6.0 IDE is no longer supported as of April 8, 2008, however, the Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications
>Date Published: >3/23/2021
The installer was originally digitally signed with a sha1 certificate. The sha1 certificate with replaced with sha256 on 3/23/2021.
Does XYPlorer work with Wine?
Because they lack something (for worse or better depending on one's requirements) equivalent to NTFS' MFT & USN Journal. Closest is building own file db by first-time full scan and then updating via fanotify/inotify. This is what FSearch tool does.
- Extract selected archives
- Flatten current folder
- Convert selected file(s) to various formats (e.g. JPG to WebP or vice versa)
- Optimize selected image file(s) (smaller file size)
- Prepare image file(s) for publishing on my photography blog: strip irrelevant EXIF, create two variants (thumbnail and a bigger picture); see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/photography-website/#pipeline
- Prepare image file(s) for sharing - similar as above, but more for sharing vacation photos with my family on WhatsApp)
- Rename files to a certain format (e.g. images to "YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss")
- Check selected file with Virus Total
- Start a weekly backup to my external drive
- Backup my server files to my local drive
- Create a rectangle "album art" file, see my post: https://darekkay.com/blog/resize-album-art-images/
Many of those are just shell scripts and apps that I run right from XYplorer, but it's way faster than through CLI.
I've documented some of the XYplorer stuff here (see also the "scripts" folder): https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/tree/master/xyplore...
- .Net
- JVM
- Android (JDK and NDK)
- iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS
- Windows
- Linux
- WebAssembly
https://www.remobjects.com/elements/mercury/
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.
It seems that can buy a perpetual license for GBP £5000 / developer, which is equal to 16 years of monthly subscription (quite optimistic for a 3yo project).
That's better than you can say for a lot of software these days
Eg the moment you need to deal with security like certificate or whatever this goes out the window.
Extension methods/properties ("class helpers"), generics, enum types, for..in loops, static methods, closures, smart pointers, value types ("records"[1]), attributes, variables can be declared anywhere (removing Pascal's limitation), type inference, multiline strings.
Besides all of this, modern Delphi can compile code for Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as Android and iOS. It seems like there's even a cross-platform library for writing apps that can run on both Mobile and Desktop called FireMonkey.
VB6, on the other hand, is a language frozen in time. It never supported any other platform than 32-bit Windows[2]. It only really works on the new Microsoft Surface Laptops thanks to emulation, but I can also run Nintendo 8-bit games on a Surface Pro 11 using an emulator — that doesn't say much.
Unicode support is also a mess. VB6 always used Unicode internally, but this was implementing during the UCS-2 heyday (so you need hacks to use Emoji for instance). Worse yet, is that VB6 was never really designed to run natively on Windows NT, so it's mostly using using the XxxYyyA family of APIs instead of the XxxYyyW family of APIs. This means that you can only display text in a non-English writing if your system's ANSI codpeage is set to that language (in the past you had to restart Windows to change this, not sure if it has improved). To make things worse, some languages (from countries that were too pair to get ANSI pages in Microsoft during the 1990s). So no Ethiopian languages or Mongolian as the author claims. Windows ANSI codpeages also do not "fully support" Japanese and Chinese as the author claims. Over the years the governments of Japan, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have updated their national standards (which defined tables of characters that should be digitally encodable) and introduced more characters that were previously not mapped. These characters were not new or fake[3] — they were just less common, but still in use. All of these various government standards (like JIS X 0213, GB 18030, Big5-2003) got quickly incorporated into newer versions of Unicode, but the Windows ANSI codepages stagnated and they don't support some of the characters in these codepages. I'm not sure how it's going to affect VB6, but I'm pretty sure that some Unicode CJK characters would just not map into ANSI and would not be displayed even if your system code page is set correctly.
With all of these things considered, no developer who cares about their users should choose VB6 for writing a modern app. I'd also argue that no developer who cares about themselves would do that. VB6 wasn't a great language to begin with. It was better than VB3, but it was still inferior to Delphi even when it was out. Customizing the UI beyond the basics, often needed custom ActiveX components written in C++ or messing around with a lot of raw Windows API calls. Error handling was very painful too. It was never a great developer experience even back of the day if you wanted to do anything beyond the basics.
---
[1] To be fair, Borland's Pascal dialects had value types support since they've implemented object oriented programming (that came in either Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0, I don't exactly remember). Turbo Pascal "objects" could be put on the stack or as pointers like in C++. They even had destructors that would be invoked automatically when the object went out-of-scope, again like C++'s RAII. But the old "objects" kinda botched polymorphism (I don't even remember the details), so when Delphi came out they've been replaced with "classes" that are Reference-only (like Java, but initially without any form of automatic memory management).
[2] VBA was originally ported to Mac, but it is not exactly the same language, lacks the GUI designer and can't run most VB6 apps
[3] In most cases, at least: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html
> VB6 only available in 32-bit
It's honestly blazingly fast in comparison to Windows Explorer on Windows 11.
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 much more advanced, well-developed and mature alternative not relying on flaky emerging APIs that have too few decades of reliability to compare.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/micro...
Native Windows apps just never seem load that fast or work that great. It’s kind of crazy how much better the basic OS apps feel in macOS compared to Windows.
I wish Microsoft would have gone in a direction more similar to Apple, with an AOT compilation and reference counting.
JIT and garbage collection sound great in theory, but in practice I’ve found them both to be loaded with footguns that more than eliminate any benefits. At least with .NET, that is.
But a lot of people are completely out of touch, thinking something along the lines of "Clearly Golang is managed by YouTube and Google Search teams" except about .NET whenever complaining about whatever happens to Windows nowadays.
This is because there are many limitations in what can be compiled this way, and most C# applications and libraries were never built with such limitations in mind.
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 dev working on it, so couldn’t be that big.
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++)
Most of them. An implementation would have to go out of its way to make itself perform poorly if it is built on top of, say, .NET 8.
Have you heard of Ryujinx? Or Nethermind? Or Garnet? Or have you seen that .NET's Regex engine, written in pure C#, is the third fastest in the world after Intel's Hyperscan and Rust's Regex crate?
The point is: prejudice is bad. Use whatever floats your boat
I do know VB since VB 3.0 days, did quite a couple of VB 6 to VB.NET, and VB.NET to C# portings, so it isn't like I don't know the subject.
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.
Male programmers would call in and do a bit of intro so you knew they were not dumb, just busy.
VB6 programmers would say things like "I am a very senior VB developer". They were the only "very senior" programmers who did not seem to understand things about OS stuff. Like exported functions and their different calling conventions, why you need to "register" COM .dlls, environment blocks, handles, etc.
I did some VBS ASP back in the day (not VB), and the language was more just annoying, at least partially due to the BASIC legacy stuff. Like it didn't even have a hashmap, you had to import something from Internet Explorer.
Don't forget nodejs.
So, I did. This was literally the push I needed to switch to open source tooling, and it put me in the right time and place to be a Rails early adopter.
I downloaded XYplorer mostly out of curiousity, and it's actually so fast that I am slightly shocked to say that I might be switching to it.
I mean, look at EverQuest Online, insanely old MMO client, still has people building private servers, and even clients.