Hacker News Reader

Comment by frumplestlatz | Hacker News Reader

It’s so very ironic that your comment appears on this particular post. We had a much better version of this with interface builder on NeXT in the late 1980s (and later Mac OS X). Similar tooling existed for DOS and Windows.

You literally laid out your UI in a WYSIWYG, drag and dropped connections to your code, and had something working on day one.

It was even easier than the web, because what you were laying out were full components with code and UI and behavior. The web still hasn’t caught up with that fully.

When I see comments like these, I better understand why old timers shake their fist at the youngsters reinventing the wheel badly because they don’t understand what came before.

View on HN

It always felt like a huge miss to me that Microsoft didn’t bring Access to the web and/or mobile apps. For all its flaws, it was a simple drag-and-drop editor that almost anyone could use to build simple apps that could power decent-sized businesses.

Having a relational database in a gui was great. The problem with access was that it tried to support network applications as a backend but supported a punishingly low number of connections. Having an application that crashed with 10-50 connections put it in an awkward space. Businesses without a strong technical team would build on it, release with N=1 load testing, and get surprised when it crashed out at scale. MS wasn't going to improve it, because they wanted more sophisticated customers to buy SQL server.

Microsoft broke every single one of those tools. And made their own that would never work in a competing OS.

If you are looking for somebody to shake your fist at, try the market protection agencies all over the world.

>We had a much better version of this with interface builder on NeXT in the late 1980s (and later Mac OS X)

I don’t disagree, that just wasn’t available as a starting to program option when my generation started learning around 2005. If it still existed, it was way too niche for me to know about as a beginner.

And I don’t include myself in the generation that started programming through JS, I went the console route a bit earlier. But I have seen friends enter programming later on and it’s clear why that is the main choice.

Interface Builder was still the standard way to build Mac apps in 2006, and with some improvements, has remained a standard way to build Mac and iOS apps to this day (but now we also have SwiftUI).

Fair, but how common were Macs in 2006 for newcomers?

At least in my corner of the world they were practically non existing. The first time I saw macOS at all was in 2012, and it was on my pc after managing to turn it into a hackintosh with help from some random Eastern European guy from a message board.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com