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Visual Basic and other "RAD" builders were pretty neat and I think platforms like WordPress or Drupal never captured their charm. For one, any apps built on the

by dvdkon 3y ago

Visual Basic and other "RAD" builders were pretty neat and I think platforms like WordPress or Drupal never captured their charm. For one, any apps built on them need a rather complex runtime, which feels worse to me than a language's standard library or the JVM. It's a far cry from dragging in a button and then referencing it as a variable in code. Second, the graphical niceties of these platforms often run "in-process", and save what is basically code in the same database as content. This will anger most Smalltalk fans, but I think this style of development is a bad idea. I want to know that some folder full of source code is the program, and some other folder is the data, and that if I back up one or the other, it will be independently usable. I'm not saying 90s IDEs were perfect, but I don't think there's been any successful successor to their style of development. Graphical GUI builders exist, but they usually don't support making web apps, and after working with modern JS GUI frameworks, manually syncing GUI state with app state seems antiquated and needlessly bug-prone. I suppose QML with Qt Creator comes closest.

mabcat 3y ago
VB was probably the charmingest language I’ve ever used, especially for GUI. It takes the cake for “rather complex runtime” though. As I recall, they bundled the entire VB interpreter into every executable. This seemed scandalous to me at the time.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  > As I recall, they bundled the entire VB interpreter into every executable. This seemed scandalous to me at the time. You probably don’t want to know how Electron works then!
igouy 3y ago
> I want to know that some folder full of source code is the program, and some other folder is the data … That would be completely ordinary with Smalltalk. "Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users." 1984 Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment page 46 https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv.pdf https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...

by dvdkon 3y ago

mabcat 3y ago

VB was probably the charmingest language I’ve ever used, especially for GUI. It takes the cake for “rather complex runtime” though. As I recall, they bundled the entire VB interpreter into every executable. This seemed scandalous to me at the time.

mr_toad 3y ago
> As I recall, they bundled the entire VB interpreter into every executable. This seemed scandalous to me at the time. You probably don’t want to know how Electron works then!

igouy 3y ago

> I want to know that some folder full of source code is the program, and some other folder is the data … That would be completely ordinary with Smalltalk. "Within each project, a set of changes you make to class descriptions is maintained. … Using a browser view of this set of changes, you can find out what you have been doing. Also, you can use the set of changes to create an external file containing descriptions of the modifications you have made to the system so that you can share your work with other users." 1984 Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment page 46 https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv.pdf https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractivePr...