[ams6110]

What these "younger devs" don't realize is that in most cases they are simply reinventing stuff that has existed for years. Even today, the best JS MVC frameworks only just provide the capabilities to build UIs that (for example) were trivial in PowerBuilder 20 years ago.

The fact that it's considered "gee whiz" that you can enter a value into a form field and have that value automatically validated and bound to an attribute in a "model" shows how little we have really advanced.

Web UIs offer a lot in the way of visual styling and easy distribution... but the actual building of apps hasn't really advanced much.

[jacques_chester]

I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if somehow it was all hypercards or DCOM or OpenDoc or NeWS or just about anything other than a simple document format painfully hammered into the shape of an applications platform.

[jfb]

It's fun to run the counterfactuals, but ultimately, we go to war with the lousy technology stack we have, not the mediocre one we want. I'm just overjoyed that, thanks to Android and iOS, people are writing native applications again.

[SimHacker]

There are known IKnowns: there are APIs we know that we know. There are known IUnknowns: that is to say, there are APIs that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown IUnknowns: there are APIs we do not know we don't know.

[timmy-turner]

Just reinventing the wheel to not having to use Powerbuiler makes a lot of sense to me. Even if it takes 20 years. Even if it only covers the trivial features. 5 years ago, I used to work on two huge Powerbuilder projects. I don't remember having real models or support for them in Powerbuilder and these projects. Everything was just datawindows, embedded SQL and stored procedures. I'm really glad that I'm now working on a web application at a different company.

[kawera]

What these "younger devs" don't realize is that in most cases they are simply reinventing stuff that has existed for years.

And this is also true for so many aspects of the modern "stack" - remember "time sharing"?

[rdtsc]

"Those that don't learn from history are bound to repeat it"

This includes both repeating the mistakes and design issues, but also getting excited about the "invention".

[dirtyaura]

I wouldn't say that Angular is reinventing the wheel. Elegant and efficient two-way data binding is a non-trivial problem, and I haven't seen it implemented well (or at all!) in any UI framework that I have worked with in the last 15 years.

[mickeyp]

Delphi had amazing data binding. You literally dropped two non-visual components on your form; plonked down data-aware components; and then pointed it at any number of databases via ADO, DAO, ODBC or BDE and you were flying.

Unrivalled flexibility and power and you could do knock together a CRUD app in a couple of hours.

Add to that the incredible flexibility afforded by 3rd party components like DevExpress and you had grids and other tabular components that even today any amount of HTML5, JS and CSS and backend programming could only dream of achieving.

And we did this in the 90s.

[warfangle]

How was it at near-platform-universality and secure HTTP transmission?

[jacques_chester]

Windows was the near-universal platform and fairly sophisticated networking ability was inbuilt.

[coldtea]

You mean getting something else (that's orthogonal) in exchange, justifies a regression to pre-90's in other areas?

[mickeyp]

Plus it was trivial to make n-tier architectures. Tying it to the web was quite easy too, and there were components out there that made data interchange via HTTP trivial - like SOAP.

[icedchai]

It's so true... It's sad we've wasted so much effort putting square pegs in round holes.