[AtlasBarfed]

One of the OGs of 4GL GUI app development (see also PowerBuilder and the first Visual Basics). Strangely performant on 100 Mhz 486s and the like, I look back at things like Datawindows in Powerbuilder and look at how slow HTML tables are and wonder how the eff they did that with 1/100th the computing power.

Now that I'm an old coder, it really seems like pointless churn as GUI toolkits are constantly built and rebuilt, often with little to show for performance improvement. I do think CSS was a legitimate boon because it provides such a deep means for specifying appearance preferences and is known by so many people, but ultimately the toolkits are repackaging buttons/text entry/radios in mostly the same way the old 4GLs did, often with worse UI construction tools and much more complicated code.

Powerbuilder and Delphi definitely seemed to have GUI dev figured out, but each language transition needed its own (often worse) GUI toolkit and the GUI builder tools never really came. How long until NetBeans included a somewhat-decent GUI builder? Java had been around like 15 years.

NeXT had a great GUI designer too way back in 1990, although you had to write ObjectiveC for the handlers.