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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why?

Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

Would Qt count in this? I've made some applications with Qt Creator, aside from not knowing much C++ they were built almost like I would expect in C# , Delphi and VB6. I think C# is the successor to Delphi today, and if Microsoft makes WinForms somehow cross platform and an official part of C# it would get very interesting. The guy in charge of C# at Microsoft made Turbo Pascal and worked on Delphi back in the day as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

Try Red (www.red-lang.org)! It's not version 1.0 yet, GUI for OSX and Python is coming, for Windows and Android has already arrived. Small, light, great.

Well, buy IntelliJ Ultimate edition and you can go ahead and create apps like you would have done with Delphi. It has good tools for database access, rapid iteration, you can design Swing GUIs with a built in GUI designer tool, etc.

Anvil (https://anvil.works) is an all-in-one RAD tool for web apps, very much in the Delphi/VB mould. (I'm a cofounder)

Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

Mind elaborating on this?

I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?

Sure.

What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech project.

Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps were helpers.

Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd used the the decade+ since that point.

xojo (formerly Real Basic), I haven't used it but they were positioning themselves as the VB6 replacement for a long time.

It's called Delphi XE (currently 10.2)

I would .NET with Visual Studio and Blend fit that purpose quite nicely as well.

I might be a few years out of date now (no WPF since 2011) but all I remember of Blend is it was so complex to learn and use that it was easier just to hand-code my XAML. Not at all like the GUI builders of yore. That may have changed though.

It is a different mindset, not just dragging boxes around and setting properties.

The idea of Bled is to mix those RAD concepts with Photoshop like tooling for designers.

I still find it easier than trying to make web pages look like the Photoshop mockups.

For sure, and I'm not saying Blend's a bad tool (far from it). It was just total overkill for what I wanted to do and, if I wanted to use Blend well, I had to read another 800-1000 page book, after the one I'd read to learn WPF and XAML. It just didn't justify the time in terms of what I needed to achieve on a relatively short timescale at that point.

Does Visual Studio count?

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