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In my teens, I could regularly churn out a small GUI program after school in an application like HyperCard, or later REALbasic (now Xojo). I remember writing a
by rgovostes 4y ago
In my teens, I could regularly churn out a small GUI program after school in an application like HyperCard, or later REALbasic (now Xojo). I remember writing a saved game editor for Psion Boy[1] which had an editable list of inventory items, fields for character stats, and buttons for saving and loading game files.
I have many more years of experience programming now yet I could not make the same program nearly as quickly. Fire up Xcode and then fumble with storyboards or SwiftUI or IBOutlets? Start writing functional React components on a Bootstrap grid with some live reload script injected into the browser?
Modern frontend tools enable improvements like accessibility, internationalization, cross-platform compatibility, touch screen support, etc. But they have really extinguished my excitement to build anything beyond the command line.
1: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/psion-boy https://macintoshgarden.org/games/psion-boy
- pixl97 4y agoI have one more thing to add to your benefits of web front ends. Security. At least some security separation between the application and the users operating system. If I loaded the save game in a web app, I would at least have some assurity that the application was only going to get access to that one file, being the web browser is going to enforce that. With a binary thing are far more terrifying, every file I have permission to is up for grabs. Running it on my primary machine is a no go for the most part. I'll have to load it in a VM if I really want to use it. With this said Windows 10+ has the Windows Sandbox feature that very few people know about, but there is still a fair amount of friction there compared to a browser.