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Comment by vadfa | Hacker News Reader

>The ultimate "low code" experience I had was back in the 1990s with Delphi. You drag and drop your form elements, get everything just right. Next you hook up your event handlers and type in a few lines of code to do the actual work.

Today I was thinking about Visual Basic 6, which worked more or less the same way.

I wonder what similar alternatives we have today? Gambas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambas

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The problem is that you can’t usually afford to target just a Windows 95 PC or equivalent today so such a tool cannot exist. The UI must morph and adapt and feel native across phones, tablets, retina displays, etc.

Even video games these days need to adapt to a different UX on each platform even thou they are the closest to having one unified UI across the gamut

It's unrealistic to expect a full, productive, desktop experience on any smaller devices.

Giving up on the desktop is a huge step backwards.

On the other hand, the market has expanded beyond economies where users have the space, power and physical safety to actually own a desktop. For some people their first, last and only "PC" is their smartphone. Your choice then becomes embracing those users or not having those users at all.

"One size fits all" fits no one.

You build where your money is; our clients are asking for phone versions of dashboards, reports etc as they simply don't have or don't want to use desktops. Maintaining software for it is just not worth it.

I like typing stuff in and instantly seeing the results, rather than rat wrestling widgets onto a form. Rat wrestling also makes adaptive UIs difficult; again, the solution is being able to declare your UI with layout managers that apply constraints.

The most rapid UI tool I've ever encountered is Tcl/Tk. Everything else involves incurring more tedium and misery -- even Visual Basic or Delphi.

Delphi is alive! https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

> The UI must morph and adapt and feel native across phones, tablets, retina displays, etc.

Isn't that a solved problem by the likes of React Native?

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Quoting:

Highlights

- Open Source

- Written in Pascal for Pascal

- Cross-platform

- Over 200 Components

- Extendable through packages

- Package Manager with Online Repositry

- Many Frameworks

- Converts from Delphi code

- Regular Releases

You can do "drag and drop form elements and type up the event handlers" with Visual Studio and C#. The problem is that Microsoft have rather lost their way on GUI frameworks - too many of them and the latest ones are either "to be obsolete" or "not finished yet" (winui3), and winui3 has broken the interactive designer.

Theoretically it can be multi-platform https://platform.uno/

WinForms is the spiritual successor to VB6.

I'm not sure where the "confusion" about your options is coming from because Delphi (Object Pascal) still exists. You can get the Free Community Edition from here- https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

If a person knows Delphi/Pascal, there is no need for them to use Visual Basic 6, unless that was their feeling about such. There are several Object Pascal options to choose from, where if a person was previously exposed to Pascal/Turbo Pascal/Delphi, they would be able to get back up to speed very quickly.

As you mentioned Gambas, maybe you are thinking completely free and open-source, which Object Pascal has such too. The most obvious choice would be Free Pascal with the Lazarus IDE. For those that don't know or are confused, Delphi is a dialect of the Object Pascal programming language (check Wikipedia or Embarcadero website to verify). So the closest dialect of Object Pascal to what is used in Delphi (the IDE), would be Free Pascal/Lazarus. You can even import and convert Delphi projects (including Turbo Pascal) to Free Pascal/Lazarus. You can get Free Pascal/Lazarus from below:

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=downloads

https://github.com/LongDirtyAnimAlf/fpcupdeluxe (this is a special cross-platform installer)

There are also other dialects of Object Pascal that are free and open-source, such as PascalABC, which is a variation for .NET. You can check it out here- https://github.com/pascalabcnet/pascalabcnet

Vb6 still works. I just put out a new version of my project today :)

I love this, you are a great example of dark matter developer, using old and boring tech to deliver everyday some real value to businesses

> Today I was thinking about Visual Basic 6, which worked more or less the same way.

VB .NET, which is just Visual Basic now, is like that and is "modern".

The first one I encountered from that same era was Interface Builder, on the NeXT. And it turns out it's still around, as part of XCode on the Mac.

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