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It's a special case of a more general trend: the complete abandonment of what were once called RAD (rapid application development) tools. Microsoft also killed

by api 7y ago

It's a special case of a more general trend: the complete abandonment of what were once called RAD (rapid application development) tools. Microsoft also killed WYSIWYG Visual Basic (pre-dotnet), quite possibly the most productive GUI builder ever made. Not quite as clean as hypercard, but another example of that bygone era when the user was the customer and not the product. The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, and it seems pretty solidly locked in. Still I do see a push to replace spreadsheets with opaque SaaS tools that do specific things.

slowmovintarget 7y ago
My first real software dev job was with Visual Basic 3.0, then Delphi 1.0. This World Wide Web thing was about to happen, but hadn't quite yet. Compuserve was where the cool kids hung out, and I ran a WildCat BBS with a buddy out of his basement. RAD was rad, for a while.
- mycall 7y ago
  WWW was in effect for many years before 1995, although that was its take off year.
pac39 7y ago
Basically the cloud killed it. As more and more apps started moving to the cloud, there was a lesser need for local app development tools. The GUI development tools of today look like the ruins of a once great programming civilization of 90s.
pjmlp 7y ago
VB.NET is still very productive and outside HN bubble I keep seeing people adopting it when their Excel sheets with VBA macros aren't no longer enough for what they do.
devnulloverflow 7y ago
> The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, .... I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Easy, it would be like Xerox PARC and Lisp Machine REPLs from the 70's and mid-80's. Which is something that one can come close to with PowerShell, Fish and any IDE based REPL.
ako 7y ago
RAD is big business these days, there are whole quadrants of gartner and forester specialized in what RAD is called today: low-code
achamayou 7y ago
Check out Logic Apps :)

by api 7y ago

slowmovintarget 7y ago

My first real software dev job was with Visual Basic 3.0, then Delphi 1.0. This World Wide Web thing was about to happen, but hadn't quite yet. Compuserve was where the cool kids hung out, and I ran a WildCat BBS with a buddy out of his basement. RAD was rad, for a while.

mycall 7y ago
WWW was in effect for many years before 1995, although that was its take off year.

pac39 7y ago

Basically the cloud killed it. As more and more apps started moving to the cloud, there was a lesser need for local app development tools. The GUI development tools of today look like the ruins of a once great programming civilization of 90s.

pjmlp 7y ago

VB.NET is still very productive and outside HN bubble I keep seeing people adopting it when their Excel sheets with VBA macros aren't no longer enough for what they do.

devnulloverflow 7y ago

> The only remaining representative of that era is the spreadsheet, Well that and, Bash, Zsh, Ksh, Perl, Awk, Sed, .... I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if command lines hadn't stopped evolving in the '90s.

pjmlp 7y ago
Easy, it would be like Xerox PARC and Lisp Machine REPLs from the 70's and mid-80's. Which is something that one can come close to with PowerShell, Fish and any IDE based REPL.

ako 7y ago

RAD is big business these days, there are whole quadrants of gartner and forester specialized in what RAD is called today: low-code

achamayou 7y ago

Check out Logic Apps :)