Ofc, there's an evil undercurrent to the "any non-technical person can use it". We ended up having to support a tool that some "business analyst" had written. My eyes bled.
On one hand, he was ignorant in regards to everything we thought was mandatory for development: version control, code style, code structure. We, young Cpp/Python programmers, despised him.
But nothing we had (QT, 2007-2008 web tech, etc) made it possible to spit out a business UI in an hour.
To be honest, I still don't see anything comparable.
I think it's just around the corner for those types of applications to come back. And surprisingly, they will come hand in hand with note-taking outliners, not your run-of-the-mill no-code or low-code tools.
See for example Obsidian canvas, released this week. I see it as functionally similar to Visual Basic GUI editor, except simpler and easier to edit; and its layout is stored as JSON in a .canvas file. The open-source Logseq is adding similar visual layout templates together with data-recovery primitives.
They just need to add the core interactive data widgets (text field, text area, buttons) and expose the cards to a programming language in a end-user accesible way, and you'll have the power of a visual language, except web-integrated and with a really simple way to add data (the outliner editor).
Thus the abundance of those browser-wrappers such as Electron. The html/js stack is far from trivial but it really is truly portable.
So the new visualbasic has to be different, and I don't think newer ms tools cover this niche.
I can still get there with modern tools, but the defaults / conventions in VB are simply superior to anything I’ve worked with since.
Yet in this community of all the people who could make it happen, we can't make it happen! What are we missing? Time? Money? Co-ordination?
But imagine in Tkinter and Python, probably the least steps to get a basic UI, there is so much to manage.
In vb you double clicked a button in the designer and got a place to type code. All the stuff about event loops, and not blocking the thread was dealt with for you. In Python if you try the same thing the app freezes continuously. Then you want to do simple everyday things like a date picker, or progress bar, and find you need to implement it yourself????
Then having built your app in Tkinter and Python, you want to share it with some colleagues...so where is the 'compile button'?
It is easier to implement a machine learning model in Python than it is to make it into a standalone app with a file importer and a 'go' button!
The way translation is implemented today is horrifying.
Likewise for high-DPI. Why are they still using some linear scaling of icons instead of a super-resolution GAN and some caching?
Why can't an OS translate a single-language app on the fly using state-of-the-art translation neural nets and using visual attention to capture context? It's almost 2023 ffs, and people are still using some gettext nonsense?
I didn't get the hate. Maybe software engineering folks don't want coding to be fun and productive.
Rebol, Red, tcl/tk are good and easy programming languages, but kinda niche and obscure. I have no idea why computing is getting more complicated instead of easier.
But yes, looks like the web was a trendsetter that pushed things into becoming harder without any good reason. Or maybe the web was just following the trend of the toolmakers all going out business at the early 00's (thanks a lot to Microsoft).