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As a developer of desktop applications as well, I've asked myself these same questions. While I don't have any definitive answers for you, I'll share my thoughts. If you consider that an ecosystem evolves to the constraints of its environment, even from their pre-history at Xerox Parc, early GUI frameworks were incredibly constrained. But I think the most important constraint in their development was object orientation. Smalltalk blazed the trail for GUI programming, everyone else following after modeled their systems in that way. Object orientation became the most expressive way to program a hierarchical widget system (which most desktop systems are). Even early Windows HWND-style programming emulates virtual dispatch in non-object oriented C (also 'gobject'). In response, a vast body of knowledge and techniques around object orientation were amassed to mitigate these constraints as the ecosystem matured through the 80s and 90s. Not just patterns like MVC, Flyweight, Command et al, but also structural techniques like the event loop. > Eventually, somewhere near the end of the 90s/middle of the 2000s, most of these things were "solved" for desktop/native, or put less charitably, they stopped changing. So at the end of the 90s/middle of the 2000s the web browser grew out of being a document viewer into a very constrained widget kit, but the programming model was not object oriented and so the 'solved' problems needed to be solved again for a new set of constraints. Few of the traditional techniques applied, and the old object oriented way was either adapted (e.g. data binding became Redux, Flyweight/Prototype became templates) or disposed. Personally I find it a bit of a waste, but I don't expend any energy in the new ecosystem, so I don't want to be too judgy. But I don't think desktop widget kits 'stopped changing', and are cherry-picking ideas from the browser, like 'declarative' (XAML, QML, etc) and 'responsive' (widget containers that re-flow the viewport for phone/tablet orientation etc). I hope I haven't misunderstood your question and wasted everyone's time. |