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Comment by eterm | Hacker News Reader

TWenty years ago windows development was a lot simpler than modern browser applications. Fire up visual studio and create a new winforms project.

You could literally drag and drop your way to a modest application with only minimal programming 'under the hood' for the business logic.

I still don't think anything has surpassed the usability of winforms for a developer just wanting to get something done.

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Can confirm. I love winforms. Convinced that even the most hardcore Unix devs are missing out on the sheer joy of being able to double-click on a form you just dropped into an editor and seeing it automatically add an event handler for the common case of whatever type of UI component it is. (Buttons are onclick, inputs are ontextchange, etc.)

I think QTCreator provides a similar experience, but I haven't used it in years and might be wrong.

Glade did that decades ago for GTK+ apps too. A WYSIWYG UI editor which prepared all the UI boilerplate code for you automatically.

There are RAD IDEs for popular Unix frameworks like Qt or Gnome and probabyly much more I haven't heard about.

XAML in Visual Studio is similar. You can put in the call to the handler, then "Go To Definition..." and it will create the handler for you.

Nothing surpassed Delphi from early 2000s. Not even WinForms.

There are plenty of website builders that don’t require you to code. Platforms like squarespace or wix make it really simple.

I do not think that you would be able to do ActiveX, COM, OLE, MFC, C++ after 2 weeks of bootcamp. Yes, Delphi and Visual Basic simplified many of it but there were still many challenges to develop and ship your software. Just shipping alone and dealing with installers was a challenge by itself. Now compare it with a browser tab and a single click that deploys your code across the globe so it event can run in space on ISS.

But here's the thing: you didn't needed COM or ActiveX or MFC in many cases. You could literally wire up and build an up pretty effortlessly. With webdev today we jump directly to very complicated things when 90% of the time they are not needed.

For simple things we still have Excel and Ms Access where people continue to build simple UIs for personal use. At my previous job, our CFO build own framework (Excel) to manage and automate financial reports (which makes him a full-stack developer based on industry standards)

I guess the frustration comes from the fact that historically Web started as a set of static HTML files to create/publish documents and we inertially compare todays Web with it but we if stop comparing apples with oranges than it becomes apparent that:

1. It's never been simpler to create and publish web content 2. It's never been simpler to build/ship/and distribute software

Complexity arises when people (given many options) pick wrong tool for a job.

Picking the wrong tool but also cargo cults. If everyone is a X-developer and is using Y and you are working in X you start to wonder if you should be using Y, right?

My 15 year old Delphi program which runs the whole factory still hasnt been replaced, despite the company and IT staff growing by 10x. Its now taken 4 years, 3 IT Managers and 2 consulting firms to decide Delphi is archaic and it will all be re-written using "cloud and modern frameworks". They have given the team of 3 developers 2 years to do it. Considering they have not managed to keep a developer or IT Manager for longer than 18 months, I would say good luck. I really dont know how anyone gets anything done these days.

This was available way before with Delphi and now Lazarus. And it produced single native exe that did not require install.

drag and drop forms from 20 years ago assumed a desktop PC. Today your form has to work on mobile

Help me understand why that is significant, or is that your point, that the viewport changing shouldn't be a big deal. Not following.

The drag and drop your parent comment mentions is used for creating the WinForms application, not for interacting with it. Creating the application is still done on a Desktop PC.

Correct, but the form itself was always a fixed layout, designed for desktop, not a responsive layout where things changed based on the size of the user's display and the input methods available to them

The browser is powerful enough now that one could replicate this if one wanted to. I don’t think it’s the pinnacle of software development, but it had some advantages.

This seems true in the same sense that every language is theoretically equivalent because they’re Turing complete: technically true.

The difference is that winforms basically had one way to do everything which expedited development because it skipped all of the infinite number of stupid small decisions and libraries that must be cobbled together in a typical SPA.

Win32 could do it all. And in windows there was often a different way to handle things like video across each major OS version. Yet still, I feel it was simpler! Crazy!!

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