Too many irons in the fire is definitely one of my bigger self-imposed limitations! If I can learn to focus on one project at a time, maybe I'll get something done!
But I wanted to mention something about QB64 / QB64PE that doesn't limit me, but rather has helped and enabled me to achieve: its stability with being backwards-compatible! It seemed like I just started discovering QuickBasic & QB45 when everything started moving to VB. For a while I settled into VB6, but after just a couple years along came VB.NET. And before long the .NET 2.0 framework, and Microsoft was deprecating QuickBasic and VB4/5/6. And then language features in the earlier .NET versions started getting deprecated. Not just Microsoft's languages, but that was a big one, and it limited me because like Steve and a lot of people, I'm busy and don't always have time to finish my pet projects right away. I might work on something snd then get busy and on the bsckburner it goes for weeks, months, sometimes years. In that time, the languages and even the operating systems I develop a lot of these in, get deprecated & abandoned by Microsoft or whoever, and I don't always have time to stay current with changing languages, let alone go back and rewrite EVERYTHING that was working before, just to catch back up to where a I was. On top of that, my old completed projects no longer work on people's computers.
So for me at least, QB64/PE is a godsend, in that it fixes that very aggravating and disheartening problem of programming software. It is actually feasable that the programs I write today will still work in 5+ years!
The only other languages on the desktop where my work has continued to function and remain useful (for the most part) for a decade or two has been MS Office VBA macros and vbscripts. There were some growing pains when Office 2007 came out and you had to fix stuff for 64-bit compatibility. Now Microsoft has announced they're deprecating vbscript, and who knows how long VBA will be supported (I'm not looking forward to converting 1000s of lines of code into Python or PowerHell or whatever the frack they expect us to move to. I like BASIC, dammit!)
So kudos to QB64/PE and the respective communities for keeping this stuff alive and making it possible to continue on with projects that otherwise might die in deprecation! And they STILL manage to keep adding useful new features, without breaking old programs (for the most part!)
But I wanted to mention something about QB64 / QB64PE that doesn't limit me, but rather has helped and enabled me to achieve: its stability with being backwards-compatible! It seemed like I just started discovering QuickBasic & QB45 when everything started moving to VB. For a while I settled into VB6, but after just a couple years along came VB.NET. And before long the .NET 2.0 framework, and Microsoft was deprecating QuickBasic and VB4/5/6. And then language features in the earlier .NET versions started getting deprecated. Not just Microsoft's languages, but that was a big one, and it limited me because like Steve and a lot of people, I'm busy and don't always have time to finish my pet projects right away. I might work on something snd then get busy and on the bsckburner it goes for weeks, months, sometimes years. In that time, the languages and even the operating systems I develop a lot of these in, get deprecated & abandoned by Microsoft or whoever, and I don't always have time to stay current with changing languages, let alone go back and rewrite EVERYTHING that was working before, just to catch back up to where a I was. On top of that, my old completed projects no longer work on people's computers.
So for me at least, QB64/PE is a godsend, in that it fixes that very aggravating and disheartening problem of programming software. It is actually feasable that the programs I write today will still work in 5+ years!
The only other languages on the desktop where my work has continued to function and remain useful (for the most part) for a decade or two has been MS Office VBA macros and vbscripts. There were some growing pains when Office 2007 came out and you had to fix stuff for 64-bit compatibility. Now Microsoft has announced they're deprecating vbscript, and who knows how long VBA will be supported (I'm not looking forward to converting 1000s of lines of code into Python or PowerHell or whatever the frack they expect us to move to. I like BASIC, dammit!)
So kudos to QB64/PE and the respective communities for keeping this stuff alive and making it possible to continue on with projects that otherwise might die in deprecation! And they STILL manage to keep adding useful new features, without breaking old programs (for the most part!)