Hacker News Reader

> You’re expected to haul in some third party widget that’s half-baked and lacks battle testing or roll your own, which is ridiculous and a massive productivity + UX killer.

Reminds of early-mid-00s and Delphi components. The standard components were fine, but lacked many important features (including Unicode!), so you'd hunt/shop around for third-party components.

View on HN

This was the case for REALBasic too, which is where I first dipped my toe into programming. It was a wonderful intuitive learning environment (want to change what a button does? Double-click it to edit its code!) and could build to OS 9, OS X, and Windows with one click which was amazing, but it was very easy to hit the limits of what its standard widgets were capable of, which meant that you had to go get third-party widgets, most of which were commercially licensed (and meant most serious REALBasic apps used commercial widgets).

That probably wasn't as much of a problem for a working adult but it wasn't much fun as a broke teenager itching to make things (as I was at that point).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com