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by lo5 1462 days ago
I miss RAD tools too. Visual Basic was hugely popular two decades ago. The ease of building GUIs was unparalleled. That experience carried over to some extent with Windows Forms, WPF, Adobe Flex, etc., but not quite the same.

A decent blend of RAD and visual programming is the Max/MSP that ships with Ableton Live. It's fairly straightforward to build little audio/MIDI devices, then switch to visual programming for the implementation (objects/patchcords/control in Max terms).

> Doing GUIs only in code is tedious and boring.

Totally. But given that most GUI software these days involves client/server, I'm not sure if there's a simpler solution.

I work on Nitro[1] these days, and it's an attempt to make GUI development simpler and less tedious, primarily by trying to abstract away client/server programming and opting for a simpler way to program UIs without dealing with callbacks or event-handlers.

[1] https://github.com/h2oai/nitro