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by Arch-TK 40 days ago
You don't need to be meticulous if you want your software to look like a 5 year old drew it, which maybe you don't care about.

But even so, hand placing 20 labels, editing them to say the right thing, then hand placing the entries, making sure the tab order is correct, you don't want to be doing that by hand. And it gets worse if you need to edit this in the future.

I am not saying this because I think it sounds stupid, I am saying this because I spent 4 years at an organization where this was the only method to do things and I _know_ for a fact that it is stupid and tedious. Given that we had the list of fields, if the language wasn't hot garbage, and the organization wasn't stuck in the past, we could have made it so 99% of fields on 99% of forms could have been placed automatically and cleanly saving literally months of development time in total.

We needed a complex UI for something which could not be done natively using this technology and I proved this to be true when I made a data driven UI in a fraction of the time it was taking to iterate on the legacy version which had 1/10 of the features.