[bcoates]

I've used WYSIWYG UI dialog editors (mostly the one MSVS used to bundle with C# in... I wanna say 2012?) that maintain their entire state as somewhat-editible two-way code (so if I modified the code, at least within a constrained envelope, it would be reflected in the editor and remain WYSIWYG editable).

Does that count?

If so, I think the lesson is you need to keep the no-code side way, way less ambitious than is theoretically possible in order to keep everyone sane and you might actually have a useful tool that doesn't dig you into a big hole.

[SCUSKU]

Definitely agree with you in terms of limiting functionality built on top of WYSIWYG UIs. 2 years ago I developed a non-trivial app using Retool and it became an unmaintainable spaghetti monster "code" base. (Side note: Retool was pretty solid, my application was just way too complex for it)

The result was I wasted 6 weeks of time when I should've just spent 2-3 days prototyping and then throw out the tool once I had a good idea of what we actually wanted. In the end if didn't matter since the project died anyways :/

[cuffe]

PM at Retool, agreed this is hard problem. Like you said, most projects fail so Retool can help you validate and get to success or failure faster. But yeah totally agree that performance, making diffs cleaner, and code search are some things we’re really working on.

[monknomo]

Yeah, I had similar experience with https://eclipse.dev/windowbuilder/ in java swing. You can use the drag and drop for most of it, and if you need to hand edit some code, it mostly works and is reflected in the gui tool.

I thought it was pretty productive and honestly sort of miss that kind of development

[duxup]

That counts to me. Very interesting.