[vatotemking]

Rapid Application Development, similar to classic Visual Basic and Borland Delphi. I remember being a college student and we can create GUI apps with relative ease.

Today, even electron is reserved for the experienced web dev. See roadmap.sh

I believed we've lost a lot when we transitioned from desktop apps to web and mobile apps and JavaScript won.

Even ActionScript was way ahead of JS during its time!

[tjansen]

Low-Code tools like Retool allow you to do this. They have the same limitations though (like inflexible layouts that don't adapt to different screen sizes), which hurts especially on mobile.

[beagle3]

There were similar low code/no code systems at the time, they were called “App Makers” or “App Generators”.

Something in the class of VB6 or early Delphi is not commonly available. Everything today is comparatively clunky and bureaucratic. They can do a ton more, but take a lot more effort to produce the first usable thing.

(Similar to the simplicity of old rom basics in micros is now unavailable. You can do a lot more, and more easily, but you can’t just 10 print “hello” / 20 go to 10

[pcdoodle]

Xojo does a pretty good job (Like VB6 for Mac/Win/Linux/Web)

[vatotemking]

Responsive layouts for varying screen sizes dont exists in the 90s so its not a fair comparison. Responsive Web Design was coined only in 2010. And RAD apps arent tied to the database unlike Retool.

With RAD apps, the barrier to entry is low. You install the IDE from this thing called a CD-ROM, drag some components, add some code to make it reactive (Yes we have reactive components in 1998!). Compile and run.

[ihateolives]

If it were not for VB and Delphi, I wouldn't have kept my interest for programming. Mucking around with C on the command line took my teenage self only so far before losing any interest.

If I had free time and enough dedication I'd re-learn Pascal just to write desktop apps with Lazarus. Alas, that will probably never happen.

[chakkepolja]

> Today, even electron is reserved for the experienced web dev. See roadmap.sh

I am a recent graduate, but I think UI development has always been hard, whether mobile, web or desktop. Web seems to have had the least barrier to _entry_ (because HTML and JS, I think).

I have had classmates who tried flutter tell that it's so much easier than doing the same thing on web. While it was UI builders then, UI-as-code is new trend. There are some exciting directions now too (Flutter, Jetpack compose, svelte with its first-class reactivity).