(no title)
dvdkon
|
2 days ago
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
arexxbifs|1 day ago
Yes, they were comfortable and easy to set up (and use), particularly when compared to web development.
> a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`
This is a great description of what web coding looked like for a very long time, _especially_ when it started replacing RAD tools like VB and Delphi. In fact, it still looks like this in many ways, except now you have a JSX property and React state for disabling the button, and a mess of complex tooling, setup and node modules just to get to that base level.
The web won not because of programmer convenience, but because it offered ease of distribution. Turns out everything else was secondary.
dvdkon|15 hours ago
React is over a decade old, and as far as I remember, desktop apps using embedded browsers (Electron) started becoming dominant after it came out.
The ease-of-distribution advantage is huge, but web technologies are big outside the Web too, where it doesn't apply.
(Besides my main point, idiomatic web UIs don't implement resize handlers for positioning each element manually, but instead use CSS to declaratively create layouts. Modern GUI libraries with visual builders can also do this, but it was decidedly not the norm in the 90s. Also, modern dynamic GUIs generally don't use a static layout with disabled parts, but hide or add parts outright. That kind of dynamicity is hard to even conceptualise with a GUI builder.)