General Discussion

Different people learn different things. In that same class, no doubt, there were also students who actually learned proper programming protocols.

And then there are people like me. I never followed the standard rules. Instead, I made up my own logic for writing the code for the things I was developing. Once, someone asked to see the source code for one of my most successful shareware programs. He looked at it and said, "I can't make heads or tails out of any of this. Are you really using all those global variables?"

What he didn't know was that I could remember all of those globals I used, since I was the only person developing that application. That let me write code much, much faster than through following traditional rules. Of course, it made my source code absolutely useless to anyone else. That's a flaw, but since I was the only one working on the project, it didn't matter.

I also developed routines that did stuff that Visual Basic couldn't do. Then, I uploaded sample code for those things to a VB group on CompuServe. For example, I did an animated opening splash screen for my software. The sample I made available demonstrated two things: How to test an individual PC for speed and create a constant that could be used to control timing of anything down to the thousandths of a second. The other thing was a trick for cycling through the images in the animation fast enough to produce a smooth animation. That trick used a little-known function in Visual Basic that let you stack graphics and then control them by making the box the images were in visible or invisible. Before that, it was though to be impossible to create animated images in Visual Basic. You just needed to understand the platform well enough to trick it into doing what you wanted.