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Feels like a list of stuff where he massively underestimates the complexity of the fields he's talking about. Drag and drop UIs have, as he indentified, been t

Feels like a list of stuff where he massively underestimates the complexity of the fields he's talking about. Drag and drop UIs have, as he indentified, been tried. They were a leaky abstraction where incremental functionality was difficult to implement.

TimTheTinker 5y ago
I think he means things like XCode's Interface Builder. He's not massively underestimating the complexity as much as saying that huge swaths of that complexity are unnecessary, were it not for business requirements that often require us to do things the cheapest way possible (like hiring "fungible" web engineers to build an electron app instead of paying native platform engineers to build a first-class native app) -- and thus cause long-term harm.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I have lightly used both web UI stuff and native UI stuff, and on the desktop at least, web UI concepts are lightyears ahead. I think native UI development for PCs will return when and if the concepts there catch up with the present state of the abstractions and patterns that work for web dev. GTK, the one I know the best, is still in an era where object orientation is a new and technically difficult thing to achieve. Not bad at all, but we can do things so much more advanced than that if we port over the lessons learned when inventing ways to manipulate and efficiently push updates to the document object model. There are some projects working on this but they are not yet at the level of "copy paste works," or "you can use either a retina or non-retina display and it won't look badly scaled or blurry on either." But I hope this will be sorted out soon because there is a lot of software I want to write with it.
Zviedris 5y ago
Yeah, like could start list with just solve PvPN problem :)
drewcoo 5y ago
"The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them." The fact that he thinks they would take money implies that he believes they would be complex. Simple problems shouldn't cost much to fix.
pjc50 5y ago
No, Visual Basic worked fine. People built an entire generation of native business apps in it. Drop a bunch of labels, buttons and textboxes, wire the list view up to the database, and away you go. The hard problem is native vs. cross platform.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
I've never seen a web UI that couldn't be built, and built better, in an hour with an old school drag and drop gui builder. Unfortunately the web was built on markup, and markup is a terrible way to define a UI. There is really no way to make a good gui builder for html/css, so we are stuck with literally the worst possible way to build UIs today. CSS is 24 years old, and nobody has figured out a sane way to use it yet. We've gone from inline styles to "semantic" to BEM, and we've come full circle to what are basically inline styles (tailwind) and they all suck. Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today. In many ways the history of building UIs in HTML is just people trying to find ways to mimic a frames/tables layout without using frames and tables.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  There are a ton of effective drag and drop GUI builders for HTML/CSS: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Plasmic to name a few, and that's just the current generation (see also: Dreamweaver et al.). > Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today How? CSS and HTML can do practically everything frames could do (the only thing I can think of that doesn't apply is independent histories). There are a lot of different technologies at your disposal -- grid, which is probably the most intuitive; flex box; or just `position: fixed` divs.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Are those building a GUI? Or just a website? As far as I know they’re mostly about markup.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      That's a strange distinction to make. Websites are a type of GUIs. You can build some pretty complicated things without JavaScript, but if you need JS, then yes, most of them support it in some form or another, Plasmic probably being the most sophisticated.
      - hulitu 5y ago
bigiain 5y ago
So the answer is _Electron?_ I think way to many people massively underestimate the complexity they add to a problem when their solution involves Electron, React, and npm… I’m less convinced than most commenters here that he’s underestimating the difficulty of some of what he proposes, he ends with: “ The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them. Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place. ” Amidst his snark (which I’ll acknowledge will put some readers off) and some borderline probable racist dog whistling (which certainly put me off a bit), he is totally acknowledging that these ideas require smart engineers with budgets and mandates to spend the time making them come true. He’s not suggesting the 12 week boot camp front end engineers should be parsing c header files and inspecting deeper I to he c code to discover the stuff you need to use those to auto generate interfaces for other languages. But surely some of the senior AWS engineers should be spending their time investigation his ideas about ec2 and cloud and OSes?
carapace 5y ago
Delphi was pretty awesome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

TimTheTinker 5y ago

I think he means things like XCode's Interface Builder. He's not massively underestimating the complexity as much as saying that huge swaths of that complexity are unnecessary, were it not for business requirements that often require us to do things the cheapest way possible (like hiring "fungible" web engineers to build an electron app instead of paying native platform engineers to build a first-class native app) -- and thus cause long-term harm.

whatshisface 5y ago
I have lightly used both web UI stuff and native UI stuff, and on the desktop at least, web UI concepts are lightyears ahead. I think native UI development for PCs will return when and if the concepts there catch up with the present state of the abstractions and patterns that work for web dev. GTK, the one I know the best, is still in an era where object orientation is a new and technically difficult thing to achieve. Not bad at all, but we can do things so much more advanced than that if we port over the lessons learned when inventing ways to manipulate and efficiently push updates to the document object model. There are some projects working on this but they are not yet at the level of "copy paste works," or "you can use either a retina or non-retina display and it won't look badly scaled or blurry on either." But I hope this will be sorted out soon because there is a lot of software I want to write with it.

Zviedris 5y ago

Yeah, like could start list with just solve PvPN problem :)

drewcoo 5y ago

"The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them." The fact that he thinks they would take money implies that he believes they would be complex. Simple problems shouldn't cost much to fix.

pjc50 5y ago

No, Visual Basic worked fine. People built an entire generation of native business apps in it. Drop a bunch of labels, buttons and textboxes, wire the list view up to the database, and away you go. The hard problem is native vs. cross platform.

jacobsenscott 5y ago

I've never seen a web UI that couldn't be built, and built better, in an hour with an old school drag and drop gui builder. Unfortunately the web was built on markup, and markup is a terrible way to define a UI. There is really no way to make a good gui builder for html/css, so we are stuck with literally the worst possible way to build UIs today. CSS is 24 years old, and nobody has figured out a sane way to use it yet. We've gone from inline styles to "semantic" to BEM, and we've come full circle to what are basically inline styles (tailwind) and they all suck. Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today. In many ways the history of building UIs in HTML is just people trying to find ways to mimic a frames/tables layout without using frames and tables.

ironmagma 5y ago
There are a ton of effective drag and drop GUI builders for HTML/CSS: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Plasmic to name a few, and that's just the current generation (see also: Dreamweaver et al.). > Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today How? CSS and HTML can do practically everything frames could do (the only thing I can think of that doesn't apply is independent histories). There are a lot of different technologies at your disposal -- grid, which is probably the most intuitive; flex box; or just `position: fixed` divs.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Are those building a GUI? Or just a website? As far as I know they’re mostly about markup.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    That's a strange distinction to make. Websites are a type of GUIs. You can build some pretty complicated things without JavaScript, but if you need JS, then yes, most of them support it in some form or another, Plasmic probably being the most sophisticated.
    - hulitu 5y ago

bigiain 5y ago

So the answer is _Electron?_ I think way to many people massively underestimate the complexity they add to a problem when their solution involves Electron, React, and npm… I’m less convinced than most commenters here that he’s underestimating the difficulty of some of what he proposes, he ends with: “ The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them. Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place. ” Amidst his snark (which I’ll acknowledge will put some readers off) and some borderline probable racist dog whistling (which certainly put me off a bit), he is totally acknowledging that these ideas require smart engineers with budgets and mandates to spend the time making them come true. He’s not suggesting the 12 week boot camp front end engineers should be parsing c header files and inspecting deeper I to he c code to discover the stuff you need to use those to auto generate interfaces for other languages. But surely some of the senior AWS engineers should be spending their time investigation his ideas about ec2 and cloud and OSes?

carapace 5y ago

Delphi was pretty awesome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)