A few days ago I tried getting a simple PyQtWebengine example working using pyqt6 and failed miserably. It was a frustrating experience for sure
Back in the dialup days, my modem was plugged into a homebrew Linux firewall/router so that I could use the Internet from multiple machines at once. Which outside of a large business or college campus, was considered pretty much advanced wizardry back then. The problem was that I had one phone line and couldn't tie it up all the time. I wanted to be able to open a program on the desktop of another computer, click a button marked "connect to internet" and have that talk to the server to start the dialup process. And then also a "disconnect" button to hang up later. With a little text box to show any errors and whatnot. There were some half-solutions to this in existence at the time, but nothing that fit my exact use case.
I had been beating my head against various Perl experiments which weren't getting me anywhere until finally someone on IRC said, "oh, have you tried Tcl/Tk?"
Tcl was so easy to learn that I had a working proof of concept by the end of the day. Another couple of days to tidy it up. Used it daily for a few years until DSL came to my area.
These days, if tcl/tk doesn't suffice for my project, then I just move onto another environment entirely.
Former VB devs pine for the usability and speed they once enjoyed. But most tech ecosystems that are self-contained enough to benefit from focused/lightweight devtools can't support a player large enough to develop them. And the ecosystems that are big enough are managed by megacorps that are more interested in brokering consumer data than streamlining the developer experience. I too would love to see a renaissance of RAD but I can't figure out who would pay for it.
It is a niche (let’s be honest, desktop development is also one), but it has a surprising amount of libraries available as well.
Visual basic was different because there was only one way to create a button, so no way to over engineer a new button component. All apps looked the same and nobody cared.
I never cared much for VB as a language - but the IDE around it and the ability to very quickly create complex GUI applications was phenomenal.
Of course Electron is overkill for a single-button application. But Visual Basic is absolutely going to be a headache if you want a custom GUI.
Pick the tool that's right for the job!
I build this with Electron: https://videohubapp.com/ Good luck having infinite scroll in a gallery that is butter-smooth using something else (that also doesn't require months of learning new tools) and is cross-platform(!!!).
We actually cared a lot, just in the opposite direction - apps which didn't look the same were weird and bad.
This has got to be one of the funniest opening lines, especially in response to visual basic.
I would begrudgingly accept electron if it had the same "open program, click button , draw a button, double click button, write code" experience that VB had
I'm looking to dabble again. Is there anything similar to RAD these days? It really did make building simple GUIs very easy.
I have some (ancient) experience in RAD. Once per year I try picking up React/Vue/Angular or whatever is the current fashion, but I get stuck. It's just so _insane_.
GoVCL's author built a C library called liblcl [2] which is what GoVCL uses to control the GUI, so if you know C you can use it instead of Go.
I'm building a lightweight Steam chat client with GoVCL so that I don't need the official client that takes like 200-300mb ram just to show text [3].
[0]: https://github.com/ying32/govcl
[1]: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
[2]: https://github.com/ying32/liblcl/blob/master/README.en-US.md