[vidarh]

I keep regularly pointing out at work that the platform I'm building is basically dBase III+, with the form designer etc. There are improvements, of course - the networking etc. But at the core we're building a platform to let our internal users quickly build new forms and capture data that's pretty much about doing what the dBase form designer etc. did.

It's crazy to me that even the tools that are trying to capture this space today have not managed to beat the usability of that.

E.g. tools like Airtable are great as long as you're trying to do something simple, but then you hit their limits, and suddenly the step up in complexity to do what you need is too large. Whereas with tools like dBase you could start with "just" a database with the default entry, and the steps up to gradually build up to a full application were small in comparison.

It pains me a lot of the time to see people basically try to reinvent tools we had in the 80's and do it poorly because they're just not aware of the lessons of those systems.