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I think for vanilla GUI where you only need readily available vanilla components, Java is fine. But I suppose you would be in for quite an adventure if you inte

I think for vanilla GUI where you only need readily available vanilla components, Java is fine. But I suppose you would be in for quite an adventure if you intend to do a lot of highly customized user interfaces. The curse of JavaScript is that you can readily devise newfangled componentry so easily that as a user, you end up with all sorts of unpredictable things where straightforward tasks become much harder thanks to endless gadgetification and whizbangery. The idea of "standard" flew out the window long ago. It would be exaggeration to say QWOP has become the new normal, but only by so much... Eventually we'll get tired of this and straighten up, I'm sure. Maybe menu mnemonics will make a comeback (they really are a good idea).

jerf 3y ago
I'd love to try to prototype a GUI that harmonizes GUIs with keyboard accessibility; bring back some external component model to script them again, put some sort of effort into making that scriptability discoverable for users and easier to maintain for developers than Applescript was, make it easy to give and surface expert-level shortcuts, make it so keystrokes are buffered across contexts so you can develop expert-level skills in pre-keying what you want the UI to do even before it pops up (one of the reasons why you had to pry the console-based point-of-sale software out of customer's services hands at gunpoint), and just generally make something useful for experts again... but it's years of effort to even prototype such a thing to the point where it's useful for anything. GUIs are stuck in the 20th century because they're just so big.