[ipdashc]

I'm too young to have used VB in the workforce, but I did use it in school, and honestly off that alone I'm inclined to agree.

I've seen VB namedropped frequently, but I feel like I've yet to see a proper discussion of why it seems like nothing can match its productivity and ease of use for simple desktop apps. Like, what even is the modern approach for a simple GUI program? Is Electron really the best we can do?

MS Access is another retro classic of sorts that, despite having a lot of flaws, it seems like nothing has risen to fill its niche other than SaaS webapps like airtable.

[simonw]

You can add Macromedia Flash to that list - nothing has really replaced it, and as a result the world no longer has an approachable tool for building interactive animations.

[whateverboat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws

This is a nice video on why Electron is the best you might be able to do.

[ipdashc]

Thanks for the link - this is a cool video. Though it seems like it's mostly focusing on the performance/"bloat" side of things. I do agree that's an annoying aspect of Electron, and I do think his justifications for it are totally fair, but I was more so thinking about ease of use, especially for nontechnical people / beginners.

My memory of it is very fuzzy, but I recall VB being literally drag-and-drop, and yet still being able to make... well, acceptable UIs. I was able to figure it out just fine in middle school.

In comparison, here's Electron's getting started page: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/ The "quick start" is two different languages across three different files. The amount of technologies and buzzwords flying around is crazy, HTML, JS, CSS, Electron, Node, DOM, Chromium, random `charset` and `http-equiv` boilerplate... I have to imagine it'd be rather demoralizing as a beginner. I think there's a large group of "nontechnical" users out there (usually derided by us tech bros as "Excel programmers" or such) that can perfectly understand the actual logic of programming, but are put off by the amount of buzzwords and moving parts involved, and I don't blame them at all.

(And sure, don't want to go in too hard on the nostalgia. 2000s software was full of buzzwords and insane syntax too, we've improved a lot. But it had some upsides.)

It just feels like we lost the plot at some point when we're all using GUI-based computers, but there's no simple, singular, default path to making a desktop GUI app anymore on... any, I think, of the popular desktop OSes?

[whateverboat]

You are totally right. Going even way back, in days of TurboPascal, you could include graphics.h and get a very cool snake game going within half an hour. Today, doing anything like that is a week of advanced stuff. Someone wanted to recreated that experience today and came up with this: https://github.com/dascandy/pixel

But as you can see how much boiler plate was needed to be written for them to write this.

https://github.com/dascandy/pixel/blob/master/examples/simpl...

See the user example and then look at src for boilder plate.

In old days, you could easily write a full operating system from scratch on 8051 while use PS/2 peripherals. Today, all peripherals are USB and USB 2.0 standard is 500 pages long.

I also agree that we have left behind the idea of teaching probably or at least removed it from the mainstream.