[woah]

It's always strange when people act indignant about the fact that engineering a large frontend is difficult, like the world owes it to them for it to be easy. Frontend code is by nature highly repetitive, but each different unit has its own arbitrary tweaks because of the fact that people have to use it. This makes it very hard to abstract.

There are a million visual frontend builders out there, and they are all terrible, because you can never get them to do what you want. They are only usable to build example apps, and if used for anything real, require a huge amount of hacking around which results in code that is worse than what it would have been otherwise.

[ng12]

Yep. Underestimating frontend complexity is how we got into this mess. Say what you will about framework churn, React is the first one where I really feel like it's easy to apply basic coding hygiene (e.g. treating abstraction and composition as first-order concerns).

[murukesh_s]

>There are a million visual frontend builders out there, and they are all terrible, because you can never get them to do what you want.

I disagree. I had worked with Visual Basic and it had a great balance of ease of use and flexibility. If you are not obsessed with the feeling that you need to see the underlying code of the UI, you can have a great visual builder. Of course you need to code the event handlers, that's pretty much should be the coding required. I am talking about something like webflow + code for event handling.

>require a huge amount of hacking around which results in code that is worse than what it would have been otherwise.

that is because you haven't seen a great implementation yet. and as another commenter mentioned below, mobile UI builders are better because there is a uniformity in mobile design, while desktop (web) design lacks uniformity. It's possible.

[ecnahc515]

While I agree with you, I think it's important to maybe specify that visual frontend builders generally suck -- for web frontends. In general, the visual UI builders for mobile apps tend to be very good.

The reason I think it's important to mention this is because I believe that the amount of variability you have to deal with in the web is far greater, which is why I believe these visual frontend builder systems tend to fall apart.

[chrisco255]

There's two layers to front end development. There is the visual layer and the arrangement of UI elements on the screen...and then there's application state management, routing, http request handling, data caching, inlining assets, etc that all come into play as well. UI builders might help you arrange elements on the screen but they do little to help with the latter except for minor cases like click through handlers.

[AstralStorm]

Visual UI builders for mobile cannot even handle reusable components directly. (Similar dialogs via mixin or inheritance, style extraction etc.)

Custom widgets? Amount of work to get them running in one of these is a nightmare.

Compare that to game engines such as Unity or UDK and their editors, it's so bad it's laughable.

[murukesh_s]

Why do you think anyone haven't built a good one yet?