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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised that nobody has pulled off the "VB6 of javascript". I don't mean one of the purely no-code products, but like a literal "create a new page, drag a button, then double click it to hop into the code for a new route and a new component and go straight into the onclick handler".

Maybe that's harder than I can imagine, or it exists and just isn't a very good idea in practice (how would you even do responsive?) so it's not that popular.

VB was a garbage language by modern standards but I always liked that they gave you a visual builder, but didn't try to hide the coding from you too much.

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VB6 was a gem. To a young me who was starting out programming, there was nothing more empowering than dragging a bunch of different buttons, resizing them with mouse, fiddling with their labels and creating a calculator within half an hour. I crave for a similar dev experience but no language today seem to possess that simplicity. Today, it's all container widgets of different kinds that I have no idea how to use.

I'd say it's probably on par with 2020s web. Web is more potent in theory but for a large amount of needs, VB+forms was actual RAD. If you need more complex then you dropped aside.

I wonder how much that is to do with the fact that software is expected to run on a much wider range of screen sizes these days? Doing a drag-and-drop sort of thing when you have to support phones up to big desktop displays tends to result in the container widgets you describe.

On the web side I bet the right person could do something quite intuitive with CSS Grid though. You could drag out where you wanted various content blocks to appear at different screen sizes and generate a `grid-template-areas` [0] property to match it.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-templa...

But isn't WinForms basically VB6 RAD via .NET?

WinForms satisfies my VB6 craving.

this. I feel exactly the same, we are probably at the same age :) when I started learning html & css it was awkward for me that I need to specify stuff in pixel coordinates. For me it was a step backwards in terms of technical progress :)

XOJO? It's quite a feature rich OO BASIC with VB like GUI tools IMHO. Can compile for various platforms or generates HTML. I used it a bit in work to create an internal web app (it uses Bootstrap under the hood for that target). I found the GUI based inspector really lacking in that it does not expose all of properties of a visual component so expect to go hunting in the API docs.

But for network/web service tools, I like that it compiles into a single executable where its internal web server generates the HTML dynamically. It allows me to write small, single focus tools quickly.

[1] https://www.xojo.com

XOJO appeals to me, it's free for non-commercial use, and very reasonably priced for commercial use. The user community seems nice. Free Pascal/Lazarus seems nifty and capable, but good luck finding thorough documentation on the Lazarus GUI designer. Of course, Delphi is reputed to be absolutely awesome, but Good Grief! the price is not something for individual users.

Lazarus on the FreePascal compiler does exactly that, borrowing from Delphi's heritage. It copies VB6 almost literally, in many ways, but can output binaries for win/mac/linux.

I've written a few toy apps in it and in my limited exploration it seems to be a joy to work with, once you get used to Pascal's quirks... and I'm not a fan of the ancient MDI workflow it imposes either.

I also learned to program with VB and Lazarus is the closest thing I've found. The WinForms designer in Visual Studio would be the next closest.

Both GTK and Swing have various GUI designers that are similar, but have their own design and use different layout metaphors. If you're looking for a more modern take on what's left of RAD maybe check them out.

Small correction. If I remember correctly, VB copied Delphi.

That's why it looks so similar.

I still remember the great VB vs Borland Delphi wars of the 90's.

But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Interesting... Last time I brought this up there were some very fervent Delphi fans that seemed to agree with you. My first dev environment was VB, so I am probably biased.

Another input for VisualBASIC was Apple's MacBASIC:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

> but can output binaries for win/mac/linux

I took a cursory look and I don't think it supports Apple silicon out of the box. Considering that Intel Macs are dead end it't not too encouraging.

Given how well Rosetta 2 works, it's probably not a show stopper.

Hmm, they mention it at the top of their Mac portal (https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Portal:Mac) but I don't see it anywhere else.

Emulation works pretty well from what I hear, is the lack of support that big of a deal right now?

I think Plasmic is doing that for React.

https://www.plasmic.app/

also https://utopia.app/

> I'm a little surprised that nobody has pulled off the "VB6 of javascript". I don't mean one of the purely no-code products, but like a literal "create a new page, drag a button, then double click it to hop into the code for a new route and a new component and go straight into the onclick handler".

This is kind of what WebDev (by PC Soft) does. I worked with it in an enterprise environment. It's nice for internal products, though the code I worked with was old code made by people that didn't have any formal education and not much experience in software engineering.

My favorite part of this was not the GUI, but the deployment part: you click on a few buttons and it just deploys stuff to the server and works. My least favorite part was that sometimes this deployment didn't work and troubleshooting it was long and tedious.

All in all, it wasn't that bad to use, but a big problem is that it's not that well known, so when you look up how to do things, you have the official documentation which isn't great, the forums that are helpful from time to time, or doing it by yourself.

The problem of designing adaptively for different screen sizes (much less orientations) was one even VB6 had no answer for.

Yet things that were built, have been used.

And yet apparently they've never been good enough, because people keep asking for it.

Unfortunately the days of assuming everyone has a mouse, keyboard, and at least 4”x6” of screen to place a window on are long gone.

Some of the Wordpress, Drupal and Squarespace theme designers do the drag/drop GUI part where you can drop into the html, but it's more for graphic designers than programmers. I have watched a graphic designer be super productive with the WP Divi theme builder. But graphic designers are used to Adobe-like products with visual designers.

VB6 could make apps that adapted themselves to window size, which was more flexible than different screen sizes.

It was no Apple's Cassowary, but so isn't HTML/CSS.

Coming to Windows programming from x86 assembly language at the lowest level and Clipper at the highest, VB6 was awesome. It made rapid application development really easy.

There's GuidedTrack[1], which is a simple way to program complex surveys or tests, but can be used to create apps as well. It has been used to create Mind Ease[2] and UpLift[3].

There is a quick demo[4] on the site to show how it works.

Full disclosure: I'm a developer on GuidedTrack. Any feedback is appreciated.

[1]: https://guidedtrack.com/

[2]: https://mindease.io/

[3]: https://www.uplift.app/

[4]: https://www.guidedtrack.com/demo

It's Python and not JS, but to me Anvil has always felt a bit like VB for the web:

https://anvil.works

SproutCore tried to do that, I believe. They were developing a framework called... Greenhouse(?) that would do exactly that, drag and drop GUI and auto write boilerplate.

It never took off because SproutCore turned into Ember and then died, I think, but not before my company had written numerous things in both SC and Ember...

I see what you did there... "dying ember" :)

Greenhouse was Sproutcore's response to Atlas which was a Cappuccino product developed by YC company 280North.

In principle it worked very differently though; as you said, it was mostly a code generator. Atlas was a port of Cocoa's Interface Builder (which uses state/value serialization as opposed to code generation) to the web.

Someone has reimplemented it: https://www.radbasic.dev/components.php :)

Have you tried https://impulse.dev/ ?

Didn't ColdFusion work like that?

Kinda. But IIRC it didn't generate much (if any) dynamic code, mostly HTML. That feels like ages ago and isn't in any way useful anymore today, I fear.

Not in any way, no.

You don’t have to do responsive. Responsive UI is not at all needed for amateur GUIs.

it does exist. I am building it at yazz.com

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