[janekm]

The path of discovery of new software development paradigms is far from linear but over the long term the improvements are impressive and ongoing. One of my favorite recent examples is declarative (Flutter, SwiftUI) vs imperative UI. The gains to efficiency and clarity are significant.

[lelanthran]

> The path of discovery of new software development paradigms is far from linear but over the long term the improvements are impressive and ongoing. One of my favorite recent examples is declarative (Flutter, SwiftUI) vs imperative UI. The gains to efficiency and clarity are significant.

Wasn't Delphi declarative enough?

[janekm]

The critical aspect of these declarative frameworks to me (similar to React) is that they automatically update the presentation of the UI based on changes to the state of the application. From what I recall Delphi did not do this for the most part (aside from database bindings)?

Though Delphi is certainly a great example of the circuitous route that good ideas take.

[lelanthran]

> The critical aspect of these declarative frameworks to me (similar to React) is that they automatically update the presentation of the UI based on changes to the state of the application. From what I recall Delphi did not do this for the most part (aside from database bindings)?

Not for all components, no. For many components it did IIRC.

What it did allow was designing the UI in a drag-n-drop editor, and easily managing the state of the visual components by double-clicking on the component and adding a snippet of code.

The UI and the UI/code interactions were effectively "declared" in this manner.

> Though Delphi is certainly a great example of the circuitous route that good ideas take.

Hopefully things advance so much in the future that you will one day be saying the same thing about React, Flutter, etc :-)