[tobiaswk]

I absolutely love Flutter! It feels like what Android development should be like in todays day.

No XML or descriptive interface mumbo jumbo. You write your interface purely programmatically and it's easy to read afterwards. It also looks very good and supports most of Material Design's components. Great built-in library. Dart has some very neat features. I especially love the handling of asynchronies operations. Either use promises or the async and await syntax.

[0xFFC]

>You write your interface purely programmatically and it's easy to read afterwards.

Personally, I disagree. For more complex UI, having XML and designer is way better option than writing UI programmatically.

[Jyaif]

Complex UI are precisely the place where purely programmatic UI is a time saver.

You are going to need to do A/B testing of UI, code review, testing, accessibility/localization, and a crap ton of composability. All these are a pain when you have XML.

[pjmlp]

Yep, coming from Delphi, C++ Builder, Forms and quite a few good Java layout designers (Netbeans Matisse), WPF Blend, I never understood what is so cool about doing UIs by hand.

[sebe]

I think the sub second hot reload feature, makes it cool. Have a look at the "Unified layout" section in https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf and or install the flutter plugin in vs code or android studio and have a play.

[pjmlp]

Makes it cool, but nothing out of the ordinary for anyone used to other native GUI development tools, like the ones I referred to.

Here is Interface Builder in 1986, https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...

[barrkel]

Particularly if you have access to things like custom components (that are themselves designed with a visual designer) and visual form inheritance; these give you back hierarchical compositional tools that you would otherwise lose in a flat composition.