05-13-2022, 05:15 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-13-2022, 05:17 PM by James D Jarvis.)
I've been tinkering with QB64 like mad in recent weeks and I'm just happy it exists and has a community of users supporting it.
The ease at which it puts the modern machine on call for me is very appreciated.
I've programmed in c/c++ but never really had fun with it. Years back when I programmed much more I'd often prototype or bash out a routine in basic before making it work with C/C++ and assembler. Once upon a time I even had a major graphics board manufacturer trying to recruit me into an in-house demo squad writing graphical demos to show off their goods but I wimped out and went on to become a concept artist for an R&D firm where most of my programming skills were used to write filters and getting adobe products to import some obscure data format (contractors would try and trick my employers with proprietary formats to lock them in if we wanted to keep using the data but if I could confirm all the work they did was for hire I was into data in a couple days). I'm amazed at how rusty some of my skills have gotten but I'm also amazed at how powerful the machines have gotten and how easy to is to make use of that with QB64. A lot of the work of programming in QB4.5 and PowerBasic in the old days was getting around the system and hardware bottlenecks and some are still there but I can mostly just ignore them these days and that just increase the fun.
I sometimes worry the ease of access to very powerful features is teaching me to be lazy but that passes when I can knock off a little program without having to learn a framework or an API and how a particular implementation of the programming language does or doesn't deal with said features inside a RAD suite.
Looked at some old coding tricks and I realized...wow 80-90% of this was to get around the segment limits and the memory model. Actually being able to casually knock out a program that uses dozens if not hundreds of megs of ram is a pleasure. (I still get nervous about garbage collection.)
It's fun. Thanks folks.
The ease at which it puts the modern machine on call for me is very appreciated.
I've programmed in c/c++ but never really had fun with it. Years back when I programmed much more I'd often prototype or bash out a routine in basic before making it work with C/C++ and assembler. Once upon a time I even had a major graphics board manufacturer trying to recruit me into an in-house demo squad writing graphical demos to show off their goods but I wimped out and went on to become a concept artist for an R&D firm where most of my programming skills were used to write filters and getting adobe products to import some obscure data format (contractors would try and trick my employers with proprietary formats to lock them in if we wanted to keep using the data but if I could confirm all the work they did was for hire I was into data in a couple days). I'm amazed at how rusty some of my skills have gotten but I'm also amazed at how powerful the machines have gotten and how easy to is to make use of that with QB64. A lot of the work of programming in QB4.5 and PowerBasic in the old days was getting around the system and hardware bottlenecks and some are still there but I can mostly just ignore them these days and that just increase the fun.
I sometimes worry the ease of access to very powerful features is teaching me to be lazy but that passes when I can knock off a little program without having to learn a framework or an API and how a particular implementation of the programming language does or doesn't deal with said features inside a RAD suite.
Looked at some old coding tricks and I realized...wow 80-90% of this was to get around the segment limits and the memory model. Actually being able to casually knock out a program that uses dozens if not hundreds of megs of ram is a pleasure. (I still get nervous about garbage collection.)
It's fun. Thanks folks.