@notsle
I once saw 50 nested IIF calls.
And all on one line too. 🤦

#VB6

I know I'm very much reinventing the wheel here, especially because the wheel has been abandoned and whatever they're calling wheels these days require a supercar and a subscription at minimum to use and no one can build a wheel any more without a hundred people and a plan to burn money until a vulture swoops in to buy the burning husk for how bright it doth shine.

I *wish* this wasn't necessary, like I could just write some UI code and it'll run on any platform and it'll continue to do so forever no matter what new thing they add further down the line. Oh, wait, that already exists! It's called Visual Basic 6! I could write a GUI [to track the IP] in VB6 right now and it would run on Windows 95 through Windows 11 and via WINE on *nix.

Microsoft went on a bit of a bender in the 90s with COM, their object model, but they had the right idea if only lacking in execution (ActiveX...). If you want to embed a web-browser in your app you hook into the COM object and you're away. Different programming language? Doesn't matter. Different OS? Doesn't matter. Different *Endiness*!? Doesn't matter. Different physical location than the object? Doesn't matter, it works over the network!

Software is less modular than ever before; now "modular" just means the programmers used folders this time! Want to render a LibreOffice document inside your app? A PDF? A media player? How many years you got left?

#programming #windows #vb6 #retrocomputing

I first wrote my own text editor around 2001 using Visual Basic 6 and I used that editor, on Windows, *until VSCode was released in 2016* because #VSCode was the first non-crap Windows editor, and that might seem like a weird thing to say nowadays but in the Before Times, the best text editors in the world were on #Mac because that was the only market where developers cared about software quality and people would actually pay money for it, at all.

Windows was known for piracy and open-source software was basically unusable on the platform. We really, really have come a long way. Remember Atom? They asked the question "what if we wrote a text-editor in JavaScript?" (even worse, coffescript) and the answer was, unsurprisingly, a text-editor slower and less responsive than a teletype. VSCode was literally the first text editor on Windows to successfully copy TextMate.

But even now, one reason I stuck to my editor for so long was because it's the only editor, before or since, where the list of folders and list of files are separate which prevents things jumping around like crazy all the time and it's a feature I still lament the loss of.

#vb6 #retrocomputing

BTW Here’s a modern open-source, regularly updated, portable image editor written in Visual Basic 6 that runs on XP and up and outperforms GIMP: https://photodemon.org/

#retrocomputing #VB6