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Comment by pddpro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

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.

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