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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability and developer-friendliness.

I'm not sure if that's the right term, but by discoverability I basically mean having things like pallettes, property editors, visual builders, codegen... Basically that I can look at the pallete of widgets, drag a button onto the screen, click on it, see and rich-edit all the possible properties about the button, one-click codegen an event handler for any possible event of the button... No documentation, no guessing the names of properties of events, everything is just there right in front of me. I miss that from VB.

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VB6 sure looks nice, but I promise it was a hostile mess for anything besides simple GUI apps.

Also, trust me, the VB6 interface hits a lot different (which is to say: worse) on a cramped 800x600 or 1024x1768 monitor than whatever spacious thing you're probably viewing it on. =)

    Makes it that much more absurd that tooling on modern 
    platforms isn't anywhere near this level of discoverability 
    and developer-friendliness.

I can think of a few concrete reasons why.

1. The VB6 UI element palettes work well because there's essentially a 1:1 correlation between the icon and the thing it produces when you drop it onto the canvas. That works well for visual elements but less well for things that don't have visual analogs.

2. Toolbars/palettes don't scale well past a few dozen items, whereas a VSCode-style command palette or text command autocomplete can scale nearly infinitely.

3. The way HTML works is a totally different paradigm than VB6's fixed grids. Obviously (as this demo shows) you can do that in HTML, as long as you're willing to ship stuff that kind of works like a VB6 app.

You'd be surprised how little you need from a basic desktop application, and how much of that is provided by Visual Basic out of the box.

Also, have you used VB before? having Timer icons all over your form while not being visible at runtime is fairly par for the course.

Also it was fun to have the "invisible" timers placed near the control they worked with. Timer that updates the listbox with serial ports? It's over by the listbox and where is the code for that timer? it's in the timer, double click it!

Yeah, I used it back then. A lot of VBScript on the server and a couple of years Visual Basic on the desktop.

VB/VBScript is almost like writing shell scripts, in one sense. You can write really maintainable, even elegant stuff. It's just that nobody else is, and the language is almost pathologically constructed to discourage it.

(Although, at least shell scripting was never really intended for big apps, so, it has an excuse)

Few people were running 800x600 by the time VB6 came out. I doubt many people were even using 1024x768.

Back then I was running 1280x1024 on a 17" CRT. Which was still modest for the era.

I'd consider VB6 and Delphi peak IDE for the era. With Turbo Vision for the 80s.

My recollection (NE USA) was that crappy monitors were common.

I.T. was just less well funded in general back then, I think, and hardware was relatively more expensive.

There was also just much less understanding of "hey, developers need somewhat beefy setups"

I remember at my first professional job, I had a 100mhz or 120mhz Pentium I. The receptionist had a 133mhz Pentium I with, I think, more RAM as well. (I remember because it pissed me off...)

There were also a lot more in-house development jobs. Some small non-tech company would grow to the point that the underfunded IT guy was writing all these little scripts and VB apps. And then he'd finally fight and fight and the company would hire a second person as programmer, so the IT guy could focus on fixing people's printers and reinstalling Windows, and management would not understand why they'd need to spend an extra $2000 buying a nice desktop and monitor for the $40K/year programmer they just begrudgingly hired for their company where the average salary was $27K/year.

Shit, even in the late 2010s, in a lot of places would still look at you like your hair was on fire if you asked for a second monitor... there was a stretch there where I'd just bring one of my own... also I remember I had a job where I had a second company-provided monitor and they took it away because they were hiring more engineers and it wasn't "fair" for me to have 2 because they didn't have the budget to give everybody 2 lmao

VB6 the language was a hostile mess. The form builder approach was also in Delphi, and it was equally great there while having a far better language behind it.

Form builders don’t work for responsive design. That’s it, that’s the entire reason they got dropped by industry.

I made a utility, only partly done, to convert Avalonia files to HTML. It was intended to make cross-platform, Python/Tkinkter GUI's with HTML/Flask being a pit stop. Also, run them on QPython on Android. I got too busy to improve it past a few, form controls.

So, I think there's still potential to throw together an interface even if it can't do all of it. We do need a placeholder box that can be labeled for the controls we add manually but use its sizing info. Also, a converter that autoscales them in HTML or Qt to maintain the ratios that were in the VB6 app. For the placeholder, I was temporarily using that one control that's like a giant frame or box meant to contain others.

One reason I abandoned the idea is the AI's are so good now that we can probably just generate better GUI's from scratch or a basic, VB6 sketch. I couldn't justify the work until I try an AI with such projects. To avoid hallucinations or garbagr designs, might make sense to do the original program but AI-generate the transpiler.

Being able to drag a control onto the form and then double click it to get to the event code is just magical. I remember very well clicking around and building things for several hours before reaching for a docs back in the day.

Drag-and-drop visual design is the best possible approach until you add the constraint that the window has to be resizable. Then it turns into endlessly messing with the anchoring and resizing settings for each individual widget, and whenever you add/remove a widget or change the form layout you have to mess with everything again. The best experience I've had with UI development is on Palm OS, simply because all devices have the same 160x160 logical resolution and all software runs in fullscreen. You never have to worry about resizing anything so drag-and-drop design with everything just placed on absolute coordinates becomes feasible.

> by discoverability I basically mean having things like ...

intuitiveness?

Uhm, have you tried Visual Studio with C#? It's the direct descendant of this.

Winforms is a little dated, but much, much closer IMO to VB6. Xaml makes prettier UIs, but it's a bastardized hybrid of drag-and-drop and html.

When it came to Blazor, MS just gave up on drag-and-drop UIs.

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