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Comment by yoava | Hacker News Reader

I do not think the problem with VB was the language. I think it was the graphic / UI expressive power, a simple way to add and create custom components.

At the same time that both VB and Delphi reached peak usage, the web started to show how easy it is to express graphically and UI using CSS. When you have to write tons of lines of code in VB to get to the same as 3 lines of CSS...

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This doesn't match my experience, if anything the other way around.

CSS back then was a lot harder than it is now. There's still memes around this, but even something as common as centering an item with CSS was not trivial at all. Now we have flex and it's easy, but back then it was very much not.

VB didn't work on the same paradigm - it was a more WYSIWYG environment. You drew a button on the form, set some properties in the sidepanel, and that's that. Notably there are zero lines of code involved in this, so the whole "you have to write tons of lines of code in VB" is simply not true. Possibly you're thinking of its successor, XAML, for which this is true.

can vouch on this, since originally I really prefer WYSIWYG UI (VB, C# winforms, wpf) over web early. However security-wise it's hard to enforce when using them, since they don't really operating using client-server by default, having your backend logic prone to be reverse engineered.

This doesn't happen in web apps, since backend logic stays on the server. Whipping a html UI over the already server-client architecture is easier. In addition with ease of deployment of application making web apps very favorable.

VB and Delphi reference architecture was 2 tier - client and database. With this reference architecture, you are right about the security and distribution problems. You just reminded me of the shareware market and the hacked shareware markets...

However, early on, around 1998, people started talking on 3 tier architecture of client - server - database on both platforms. There where even attempts to build web pages using both platforms (and later on .Net), which failed because of a lot of reasons, one big reason was not understanding the advantages of CSS.

Yes and nowadays there's nodejs with react, where there's javascript on both client and server, with addition of html and css making desktop app that's not multi platform, almost obsolete.

Which is why lately companies are trying to use electron or react native to replace them.

I opened VS and looked at WPF again the other week. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience. Though my C# is sooooo rusty now (and not in a crab-like way).

I wonder if there's a market for "WPF for Golang"? ;)

Having worked for 10 years on both Delphi and VS, I understand the experience you are talking about. Having the ability to draw UI is amazing, and super productive. For business applications, it is amazing.

However, I still remember at around 2002 that we where asked to build specific custom user experiences, I think it was around reports, and using VB or Delphi was a lot of programming using draw commands... while using HTML and CSS it was fairly easy, even with the browser differences of CSS.

Any custom component in VS or Delphi (I am talking atomic components, not composite) requires using basic draw commands, and a lot of them.

The end result was that both platforms are not as expressive in terms of UI as the web, you cannot compare basic draw commands to structured CSS.

Reports, yes, that was a pain in the arse. Anything where you had to generate controls on the fly based on data was painful. Crystal Reports was both a nightmare and a lifesaver at the same time. I always thought that someone should do a better job of it, but I did not want to go there ;) By comparison producing a report (or anything data-generated for that matter) in HTML was easy.

These tools were built for GUIs, not typography where they were very weak. They outsourced document production to other tools like Crystal.

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