| Let me give a more recent example. A few years back I was building a B2B website for companies to manage event listings[1], fully modern React stack. I wanted to get the backend API up and running first so I threw together a prototype in WinForms and C#. I had been writing React all day every day for a couple years at that point, and I hadn't used C# or WinForms for quite a few years (3 or 4 at least). Also none of the GCP APIs I was using had official C# WinForms libraries (hah!) but of course everything had nice React integrations. So anyway, within a day and a half or so I have a C# desktop app up and running that has about 80% of the site's planned functionality implemented. It is ugly, but it works. Over 3 months later I have the React site up and running. The React site supported Mobile and Desktop browsers, and it looked nicer, but the productivity to create the React site was literal orders of magnitude less. FWIW I had a similar experience going from React to Svelte, I got done in 3 days what would have taken me weeks in React. (For those paying attention, Svelte was still slower than C#!) Part of the difference is that we expect web apps to be all shiny and work at any screen size with fancy CSS, vs a desktop app which can just do its thing. The other part is that, IMHO, HTML+CSS are crap for laying out application UIs. Better than what they used to be, but still absurdly complicated. [1] Create their business profile, list and manage events on a timeline/calendar, view attendees, send announcements to attendees, real time view of people as they show up to the event by hooking into Geo-locating on the phone, manage photos, and so on and so forth. |
Not just absurdly complicated, but also absurdly inconsistent. If you write an app in JS+HTML+CSS and use Electron to deploy it, the UI could literally be anything, as can the controls, etc. Nothing matches the OS UI neither, and standards have gone out of the window :(