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The last paragraph really hits the nail on the head. HTML+CSS+JavaScript is just so complex, with so many details to learn, and so many corner and edge cases to

The last paragraph really hits the nail on the head. HTML+CSS+JavaScript is just so complex, with so many details to learn, and so many corner and edge cases to understand. Not necessarily inherently, more as a result of taking a set of tools that were originally designed for doing one thing - creating hypermedia documents - and repurposing it for creating rich application graphical user interfaces. Which is ultimately a very different problem space with different needs and design constraints. I'm also struck by the total development effort required. Once upon a time, the GUI was something that the whole dev team pitched in on. Hopefully a designer was guiding the work. But all the programmers could easily pitch in on the actual implementation, with minimal up-front training. Nowadays, the work often goes to specialists, and "full stack" is actually a thing people highlight on their resumés, rather than something that goes without saying. Perhaps that has nothing to do with the technology. Some of what's going on is undoubtedly just that all professions become more specialized as they mature. The bar for what counts as a good UI has also raised quite a bit over time. And the actual ask is quite a bit more impressive, too. A single GUI codebase that can dynamically adapt to everything from a smartphone screen to a large computer monitor, without looking janky at any point in between, is something that, to my knowledge, has never been asked of a Visual Basic application. But still, even given all that, it's hard not to at least wonder if we could have ended up in a better place if we had been given a technology stack that had been designed from the ground up for the problem domain, rather than having to make do with something that was never meant for this problem domain, but has been adapted to it through the accretion of many layers of hacks.

rkangel 6y ago
I did come to appreciate how much detail (and therefore) effort goes into a modern UI. I was building something that was effectively a messaging app for my startup. I was doing it in Flutter so progress was good and things generally behaved pretty well. But so many little things needed to be done to get e.g. the input box to behave intuitively (e.g. hide 'attach image' button when writing text). I was basically copying the standard approach from FB Messenger and WhatsApp. Apps at that level of polish have raise out expectation. That changes thing for developers - when it was "just add a button" everyone could pitch in, but now it can be full time work for several people.

rkangel 6y ago

I did come to appreciate how much detail (and therefore) effort goes into a modern UI. I was building something that was effectively a messaging app for my startup. I was doing it in Flutter so progress was good and things generally behaved pretty well. But so many little things needed to be done to get e.g. the input box to behave intuitively (e.g. hide 'attach image' button when writing text). I was basically copying the standard approach from FB Messenger and WhatsApp. Apps at that level of polish have raise out expectation. That changes thing for developers - when it was "just add a button" everyone could pitch in, but now it can be full time work for several people.