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GUI development has never been as productive as Visual Basic in the 1990s and early 2000s.

You would just draw the UI, double click, and add code. Later versions also supported binding to data structures with one click and a few keystrokes.

Then we abandoned all that stuff in favor of the web and stuff trying to badly imitate the web like xaml.

It’s a bit shocking to me how totally out of fashion WYSIWYG is given how productive it can be.

If someone brought back that kind of experience cross platform with something like Go as the language, millions of programmer hours would be saved. Of course it won’t happen because nobody would pay for it even if it saved them thousands of hours.

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I actually prefer expressing UI layouts abstractly in some kind of markup. Not necessarily in HTML and CSS, because the CSS box model is crazy, but something like XAML. In fact, last time I did a native application for macOS (many years ago), I decided I'd rather use the dead GNUstep Renaissance library, which is fairly XAML-like, than Apple's Interface Builder. I know I'm in a small minority here due to being legally blind, but drag-and-drop UI building was always a non-starter for me. I wonder how many sighted developers feel the same way for different reasons.

Have to agree... Although my version was Delphi + DevExpress components.

It was exactly like you describe it: drag components onto a window, arrange neatly, click and set data binding and properties, double click to add some code, voila - done - a crazy rich, quick, offline or online app, doing anything you ever wanted - real estate database UI, hotel management, custom spreadsheets, radio station playlists...

As much as I love web development, it definitely never came close to that level of productivity, simplicity and effectiveness.

VB had this data grid control that we used all over the place. I’ve still never seen a JS version that’s as good as it was.

I know exactly what you mean - in Delphi world, DevExpress had a data grid control that was the craziest, most powerful component I've ever seen.

That thing was so much fun. Adding context menus and icons. We’ve been robbed!

I think it was the ever-distant promise of "it will be easier to be mobile friendly". Which honestly it rarely is.

Yeah it was pretty cool for the solo developer but for teams, it was hard or impossible to merge changes or version control them. Having multiple people working on a big VB6 app was an unpleasant exercise in manually coordinating who was working on what and developers frequently clobbering each others work.

That seems like a solvable problem though. Encode the generated markup in a human readable diffable format.

Still it does point to one reason that stuff died. The big one though is the transition to the web.

If only someone had the foresight to have created an App Store for VB6, we might still have it.

The Web solved the distribution/installation/update problem.

It's actually a little bit amazing to me that app stores work as well as they do. It's still higher friction to install an app than to visit a web site, but most people have accepted it.

Development was extremely efficient back then. Delphi was even better than VB6, with RAD. It's a bit sad there hasn't been any progress here in 25 years. However web applications are a more complex use case overall compared to desktop applications.

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