It's sad because what developers are really doing here is wasting tons and tons of time. If we had really awesome modern and especially cross platform RAD tools the time savings would be enormous. We could spend that time working on more interesting stuff than wiring up controls to events.

For desktop and mobile there are a few RAD tools. Some of them: QT Creator, Windows Forms, Delphi, C++ Builder X, Mono.

Maybe some are not of the highest quality and maybe there's not enough RAD tools, but that's because many people think that "true" development happens only in VI and command line.

As someone already commented, a good RAD tool can save 90% percent of the time because you don't have to connect by hand signals, events with handlers and you don't have to draw the UI by code, unless you need something specific. Doing this tasks is a tedious and boring work, takes time that is better spent doing something else like working on the app logic.

I have ranted at length before on the reason that the Web is not amenable to RAD tooling. The short answer is that you have five different programming languages (HTML+JS+CSS+Python+SQL), with each component generating source code in another language, and that's impossible for a single development tool to manage sensibly.

To take one example: One of the best things about VB6 was autocomplete. But there's no sensible way to autocomplete what keys are in a JSON value that's been generated by a REST endpoint written in Python serving data from generated SQL, all with about 4-5 different frameworks in the way.

So for Anvil, we dispensed with that and did everything in one language (Python). Python on the front end, Python on the back-end, a Python-native database, a drag-and-drop designer producing UI components that are Python objects...and all of a sudden, it's all one representation and you can autocomplete it!

(I gave a talk about how the autocompleter works at PyCon UK a couple of years back: https://anvil.works/blog/python-autocompleter-pycon17)