12 ms·

In 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong?

rchaud 3y ago
The closest thing we have to this currently is Excel. I can't believe there's no browser-based point and click software that lets you build web apps in JS.
- account-5 3y ago
  I'd have to say Access is the closest. MS Access is one of the easiest programs to use to make an app with a front end, dB, reporting, and SQL all in one package. Prototyping for a dB backed app is extremely easy. I'm fully aware of all it's drawbacks, but there's still nothing like it available today.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    FileMaker maybe. But yeah, both tools are great for in-house applications in my experience. It’s quite easy to provide actually useful features very quickly. It might not win you design awards, but often that’s not a problem in reality. I’d rather have an inventory that is correct but maybe looks a bit homegrown than one that looks like it has been designed by Jony Ive but is wrong for example.
    - account-5 3y ago
      I'm not a professional developer and have seen my share of badly designed Access applications created by people who don't understand normalisation, so get the bad rep Access gets in this respect. But I've created a couple of simple apps for specific tasks that work excellent for their usecase. I can't imagine there being a simpler way of doing them with other tech stacks.
      - steve1977 3y ago
        Hey we’re in the age of document databases and NoSQL, normalization is for boomers anyway ;)
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I remember using Access to make simple internal enterprise apps in 2017, is that no longer a thing?
- 9967d2cad_askhn 3y ago
  Because if sucked then, and it would suck now. You had Dreamweaver.
- esafak 3y ago
  They call this low- and no code programming now. There is a market for it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Yeah, but it's a modern software market - a toy market, not productivity software market.
    - Belopolye 3y ago
      [dead]
- vinibrito 3y ago
  I'm building that now!
Pompidou 3y ago
We still have it and in many place. Lazarus, windowsforth, visualtk, puredata, embeded node editors, blender, etc
dale_glass 3y ago
VB was kind of crap if you wanted to do a scalable UI. Qt has a visual designer that's less intuitive to use than VB was, but on the other hand you don't need to write all that resizing code by hand, or to be stuck with a fixed size window.
- jen20 3y ago
  This was basically resolved by the time of Windows.Forms. The biggest issue at that point was high-DPI compatibility - I haven't used Windows for long enough to know whether that is still an issue.
  - runjake 3y ago
    Nope, not an issue. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/high-dpi-support-in-windows-forms?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/hi...
- dsiegel2275 3y ago
  Yeah it was indeed. You essentially had to code event handlers to react to window size changes in which you repositioned your UI elements to maintain/scale your UI. I remember some of the first 'library' code I ever wrote as a professional developer was reusable "layout" handlers for VB3. Good times!
- loandbehold 3y ago
  Maybe fixed size window is ok for most applications? These old VB6 apps outlived every trendy modern framework. Just shows there's a different between what users care about and about what developers think users care about.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    I don't see the benefit. VB forms were something that was very easy to get started with, and then took forever to actually polish. If you wanted to make things pretty you'd spend ages adjusting positions by hand. If you want to make a fixed layout you still can with modern tools. The difference is that instead of painfully adjusting everything by hand because something is longer in Spanish and doesn't fit, you can just resize the window in the IDE and be done in 10 seconds.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Web browsers. The idea of "programming with markup language" meant a focus on writing text in order to get anything to work. There were some initial attempts at trying to make a WYSIWYG to wrestle with html and javascript, and later css, but the underlying markup, and bizarre web page rendering rules, made WYSIWYGs horrible for making anything other than the ugliest Geocities pages. As more and more programs moved from native to the web, programmers were forced to write more code by hand. Eventually by 2010 there began a "coder culture" where technology was seen as inferior if it wasn't 10,000 lines written by hand with 20 frameworks that no single person could completely comprehend. Add to that the fact that programmers were rapidly becoming bootcamp-driven MBA dropouts looking to get a startup off the ground, and the culture gets ever more ingrained by people who don't know the history of what came before or how easy things used to be or why.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Yup, web browsers are the answer. All the VB-style development and developers moved to the web, but the web's layout paradigm is fundamentally reflowing-resizeable-document-based, not the drawable, draggable absolute positioning of dialog box controls. Not to mention the fact that code was now split into three languages on the front end and one or two on the back end. You can't just write code to respond to a button click to read from the database, because now you need an API and authentication and all that...
  - xxs 3y ago
    >draggable absolute positioning of dialog box controls. Delphi had layout, so did Java (many of them). Resizable was always a thing, aside for the extremely lazy development with null layouts by some programmers. VB used to be considered a lame/toy language with its "onerror resume next" paradigm.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    No chunk of them moved on to app development for iOS/Mac?
WillAdams 3y ago
Runtime Revolution/Livecode spun out after going opensource and is now closed source: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/
steve1977 3y ago
I recently watched the launch video of Windows 95. It’s really kind of sad how little progress we made. If it’s not worse today.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
We shoved everything into the browser.
gardenhedge 3y ago
Your question is flawed. We didn't go wrong. Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Why do we get so much less delivered then today?
- eweise 3y ago
  In terms of ease of use, we went very wrong. You need to be an expert to understand all the technologies involved in a react web app, and there is no easy drag and drop coding function included.
- mschaef 3y ago
  > Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques. Much of your point seems debatable. I had a band director that was able to write a GUI app in 1992 on a 12MHz 80286 with a couple megabytes of memory. Put today's tooling in their hands and I don't think they'd be nearly as effective. Today's tools may be better by some definitions, but certainly not by all.
  - asciiface 3y ago
    yeah I mean in highschool I was writing a bunch of VB6 in the computer lab study halls. I wrote a LAN chat program for the lab, a file encryption/decryption that used blowfish, I even wrote a basic UI-based RPG game for the lab. building a UI now with modern tools makes me lose sleep
    - gardenhedge 3y ago
      How does it make you lose sleep?
- stcroixx 3y ago
  My experience was very different. At my first software job in '98, there was a whole team of women in the 50s/60s that did VB. They had long careers doing COBOL/JCL before that. That entire demographic has all but disappeared from software. More people do software dev now, but they're all the same people generally and our industry suffers from this lack of real diversity.
mseepgood 3y ago
The wrong turn was JavaScript and Web 2.0
DominikPeters 3y ago
The need for responsive design. In 1990 you could make a pixel perfect design, that looked great on the 640 x 480 display that everyone used for everything. Today your application (i.e. your website) needs to look good on phones, tablets, laptops, etc.
- steve1977 3y ago
  But does it really? Because many of them don’t. They just look bad everywhere.
- yason 3y ago
  Using a better layout engine doesn't mean we couldn't have something similar. In the 90's there were adaptive layout engines that scaled UI elements according to set criteria as the window was resized or font sizes changed. Maybe not on Windows, but there's no reason VB couldn't have an adaptive layout for its UIs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    "Just automatically figure it out" sounds good, but in practice hasn't worked.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that responsive design is a web innovation, or why we are where we are today. Here's a Visual Basic 6 tutorial from 2007 describing forms resized automatically based on screen size: https://web.archive.org/web/20100419123457/http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/34776-resize-form-controls-for-screen-size-vb6/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100419123457/http://www.dreami... If native app ecosystems had as much invested in them (monetarily and people-hours) as the web ecosystem has, it would easily blow away anything you can currently do with a browser, and it'd be much easier. But investment got steadily and increasingly redirected to the web, while simultaneously progress was being held back by the limitations of the web.
jlas 3y ago
It's even easier today with web browsers being the ubiquitous app platform, and the VB equivalent being https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/
- mattl 3y ago
  Does this give me the code and all the stuff I need to run the app? Can I write an open source app with this?
  - nylonstrung 3y ago
    You can use solutions like baserow tooljet and Appsmith for open source apps
  - jlas 3y ago
    You can export the app artifact and share it. The artifact is human readable and in a JSX format (called Toolscript). In this way it can be meaningfully interpreted, improved and customized by others in an open source manner. As for running the software the platform has a proprietary license obviously but you can host your own Retool backend from which to serve the apps to your end users (check the docker repo). This is an alternative to the SaaS/cloud based app hosting at https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/. There's a free tier to edit and run the apps but professional usage will have a license fee. This is not unlike making an app with VB which required buying VB and having end users buy and run Windows.
Beached 3y ago
it wasn't cool, hip, or elite to choose in vb. real developers didn't use vb want was the mentality
keithnz 3y ago
lots of weird and wonderful stuff in 1990, this covers some of the bleeding edge of programming in 1990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrmLfQx_to&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrmLfQx_to&t=30s
srhtftw 3y ago
> In 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong? Many of us grew tired of being locked in to Microsoft's platform, their simple yet stifling assumptions and their hostile behavior. Those who walked away from Microsoft's Omelas went in a thousand different directions. While some grew tired of being pioneers and returned or found new walled gardens, others refused to trade their freedom for comfort or simplicity.
nickstinemates 3y ago
It still exists. Modern C# and C++ have Windows Form Builder tooling built in and it's still very good.
- Loocid 3y ago
  They are good for small projects but I think they fall apart quickly when trying to do anything more complex. I've worked in multiple C# shops with both WinForms and WPF. Everyone in the WinForms shop hated it due to the enforced designer usage, and everyone in the WPF shop only used the designer as a preview window and never directly used it to build anything. I can't speak for the C++ side of things.
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    What is the common or recommended GUI framework [1] (or whatever the right term is) on Windows these days? Also, I think I read a few times on other HN threads, somewhat recently, that the GUI development scene on Windows is a mess these days, because MS changes the recommended framework every now and then. Is that true? [1] By framework, here, I mean the layer such as WinForms or WPF, that GUI developers program to.
    - Loocid 3y ago
      There are newer frameworks like MAUI but I believe WPF is the most common for pure Windows development. It's the best mix of modernity and stability. WinUI3 is coming but I don't think it's properly supported yet. There's also Avalonia if you want cross platform (not first party). Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I've been in WinForms land for a while (unfortunately).
      - fuzztester 3y ago
        Thanks.
jotato 3y ago
The Godot engine. Don't have to build games with it. Gdscript is just as easy as basic, too. I suggest making a weekend app with it and learning

rchaud 3y ago

The closest thing we have to this currently is Excel. I can't believe there's no browser-based point and click software that lets you build web apps in JS.

account-5 3y ago
I'd have to say Access is the closest. MS Access is one of the easiest programs to use to make an app with a front end, dB, reporting, and SQL all in one package. Prototyping for a dB backed app is extremely easy. I'm fully aware of all it's drawbacks, but there's still nothing like it available today.
- steve1977 3y ago
  FileMaker maybe. But yeah, both tools are great for in-house applications in my experience. It’s quite easy to provide actually useful features very quickly. It might not win you design awards, but often that’s not a problem in reality. I’d rather have an inventory that is correct but maybe looks a bit homegrown than one that looks like it has been designed by Jony Ive but is wrong for example.
  - account-5 3y ago
    I'm not a professional developer and have seen my share of badly designed Access applications created by people who don't understand normalisation, so get the bad rep Access gets in this respect. But I've created a couple of simple apps for specific tasks that work excellent for their usecase. I can't imagine there being a simpler way of doing them with other tech stacks.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      Hey we’re in the age of document databases and NoSQL, normalization is for boomers anyway ;)
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I remember using Access to make simple internal enterprise apps in 2017, is that no longer a thing?
9967d2cad_askhn 3y ago
Because if sucked then, and it would suck now. You had Dreamweaver.
esafak 3y ago
They call this low- and no code programming now. There is a market for it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Yeah, but it's a modern software market - a toy market, not productivity software market.
  - Belopolye 3y ago
    [dead]
vinibrito 3y ago
I'm building that now!

Pompidou 3y ago

We still have it and in many place. Lazarus, windowsforth, visualtk, puredata, embeded node editors, blender, etc

dale_glass 3y ago

VB was kind of crap if you wanted to do a scalable UI. Qt has a visual designer that's less intuitive to use than VB was, but on the other hand you don't need to write all that resizing code by hand, or to be stuck with a fixed size window.

jen20 3y ago
This was basically resolved by the time of Windows.Forms. The biggest issue at that point was high-DPI compatibility - I haven't used Windows for long enough to know whether that is still an issue.
- runjake 3y ago
  Nope, not an issue. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/high-dpi-support-in-windows-forms?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/hi...
dsiegel2275 3y ago
Yeah it was indeed. You essentially had to code event handlers to react to window size changes in which you repositioned your UI elements to maintain/scale your UI. I remember some of the first 'library' code I ever wrote as a professional developer was reusable "layout" handlers for VB3. Good times!
loandbehold 3y ago
Maybe fixed size window is ok for most applications? These old VB6 apps outlived every trendy modern framework. Just shows there's a different between what users care about and about what developers think users care about.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  I don't see the benefit. VB forms were something that was very easy to get started with, and then took forever to actually polish. If you wanted to make things pretty you'd spend ages adjusting positions by hand. If you want to make a fixed layout you still can with modern tools. The difference is that instead of painfully adjusting everything by hand because something is longer in Spanish and doesn't fit, you can just resize the window in the IDE and be done in 10 seconds.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Web browsers. The idea of "programming with markup language" meant a focus on writing text in order to get anything to work. There were some initial attempts at trying to make a WYSIWYG to wrestle with html and javascript, and later css, but the underlying markup, and bizarre web page rendering rules, made WYSIWYGs horrible for making anything other than the ugliest Geocities pages. As more and more programs moved from native to the web, programmers were forced to write more code by hand. Eventually by 2010 there began a "coder culture" where technology was seen as inferior if it wasn't 10,000 lines written by hand with 20 frameworks that no single person could completely comprehend. Add to that the fact that programmers were rapidly becoming bootcamp-driven MBA dropouts looking to get a startup off the ground, and the culture gets ever more ingrained by people who don't know the history of what came before or how easy things used to be or why.

crazygringo 3y ago
Yup, web browsers are the answer. All the VB-style development and developers moved to the web, but the web's layout paradigm is fundamentally reflowing-resizeable-document-based, not the drawable, draggable absolute positioning of dialog box controls. Not to mention the fact that code was now split into three languages on the front end and one or two on the back end. You can't just write code to respond to a button click to read from the database, because now you need an API and authentication and all that...
- xxs 3y ago
  >draggable absolute positioning of dialog box controls. Delphi had layout, so did Java (many of them). Resizable was always a thing, aside for the extremely lazy development with null layouts by some programmers. VB used to be considered a lame/toy language with its "onerror resume next" paradigm.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  No chunk of them moved on to app development for iOS/Mac?

WillAdams 3y ago

Runtime Revolution/Livecode spun out after going opensource and is now closed source: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/

steve1977 3y ago

I recently watched the launch video of Windows 95. It’s really kind of sad how little progress we made. If it’s not worse today.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

We shoved everything into the browser.

gardenhedge 3y ago

Your question is flawed. We didn't go wrong. Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques.

steve1977 3y ago
Why do we get so much less delivered then today?
eweise 3y ago
In terms of ease of use, we went very wrong. You need to be an expert to understand all the technologies involved in a react web app, and there is no easy drag and drop coding function included.
mschaef 3y ago
> Programming is much more accessible to a much bigger audience today and we have better tools and techniques. Much of your point seems debatable. I had a band director that was able to write a GUI app in 1992 on a 12MHz 80286 with a couple megabytes of memory. Put today's tooling in their hands and I don't think they'd be nearly as effective. Today's tools may be better by some definitions, but certainly not by all.
- asciiface 3y ago
  yeah I mean in highschool I was writing a bunch of VB6 in the computer lab study halls. I wrote a LAN chat program for the lab, a file encryption/decryption that used blowfish, I even wrote a basic UI-based RPG game for the lab. building a UI now with modern tools makes me lose sleep
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    How does it make you lose sleep?
stcroixx 3y ago
My experience was very different. At my first software job in '98, there was a whole team of women in the 50s/60s that did VB. They had long careers doing COBOL/JCL before that. That entire demographic has all but disappeared from software. More people do software dev now, but they're all the same people generally and our industry suffers from this lack of real diversity.

mseepgood 3y ago

The wrong turn was JavaScript and Web 2.0

DominikPeters 3y ago

The need for responsive design. In 1990 you could make a pixel perfect design, that looked great on the 640 x 480 display that everyone used for everything. Today your application (i.e. your website) needs to look good on phones, tablets, laptops, etc.

steve1977 3y ago
But does it really? Because many of them don’t. They just look bad everywhere.
yason 3y ago
Using a better layout engine doesn't mean we couldn't have something similar. In the 90's there were adaptive layout engines that scaled UI elements according to set criteria as the window was resized or font sizes changed. Maybe not on Windows, but there's no reason VB couldn't have an adaptive layout for its UIs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  "Just automatically figure it out" sounds good, but in practice hasn't worked.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
I just wanted to push back a bit on the idea that responsive design is a web innovation, or why we are where we are today. Here's a Visual Basic 6 tutorial from 2007 describing forms resized automatically based on screen size: https://web.archive.org/web/20100419123457/http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/34776-resize-form-controls-for-screen-size-vb6/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100419123457/http://www.dreami... If native app ecosystems had as much invested in them (monetarily and people-hours) as the web ecosystem has, it would easily blow away anything you can currently do with a browser, and it'd be much easier. But investment got steadily and increasingly redirected to the web, while simultaneously progress was being held back by the limitations of the web.

jlas 3y ago

It's even easier today with web browsers being the ubiquitous app platform, and the VB equivalent being https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/

mattl 3y ago
Does this give me the code and all the stuff I need to run the app? Can I write an open source app with this?
- nylonstrung 3y ago
  You can use solutions like baserow tooljet and Appsmith for open source apps
- jlas 3y ago
  You can export the app artifact and share it. The artifact is human readable and in a JSX format (called Toolscript). In this way it can be meaningfully interpreted, improved and customized by others in an open source manner. As for running the software the platform has a proprietary license obviously but you can host your own Retool backend from which to serve the apps to your end users (check the docker repo). This is an alternative to the SaaS/cloud based app hosting at https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/. There's a free tier to edit and run the apps but professional usage will have a license fee. This is not unlike making an app with VB which required buying VB and having end users buy and run Windows.

Beached 3y ago

it wasn't cool, hip, or elite to choose in vb. real developers didn't use vb want was the mentality

keithnz 3y ago

lots of weird and wonderful stuff in 1990, this covers some of the bleeding edge of programming in 1990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrmLfQx_to&t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrmLfQx_to&t=30s

srhtftw 3y ago

> In 1990 we had drag and drop UI creation, double-click on the button and write the code behind it. Where did we go wrong? Many of us grew tired of being locked in to Microsoft's platform, their simple yet stifling assumptions and their hostile behavior. Those who walked away from Microsoft's Omelas went in a thousand different directions. While some grew tired of being pioneers and returned or found new walled gardens, others refused to trade their freedom for comfort or simplicity.

nickstinemates 3y ago

It still exists. Modern C# and C++ have Windows Form Builder tooling built in and it's still very good.

Loocid 3y ago
They are good for small projects but I think they fall apart quickly when trying to do anything more complex. I've worked in multiple C# shops with both WinForms and WPF. Everyone in the WinForms shop hated it due to the enforced designer usage, and everyone in the WPF shop only used the designer as a preview window and never directly used it to build anything. I can't speak for the C++ side of things.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  What is the common or recommended GUI framework [1] (or whatever the right term is) on Windows these days? Also, I think I read a few times on other HN threads, somewhat recently, that the GUI development scene on Windows is a mess these days, because MS changes the recommended framework every now and then. Is that true? [1] By framework, here, I mean the layer such as WinForms or WPF, that GUI developers program to.
  - Loocid 3y ago
    There are newer frameworks like MAUI but I believe WPF is the most common for pure Windows development. It's the best mix of modernity and stability. WinUI3 is coming but I don't think it's properly supported yet. There's also Avalonia if you want cross platform (not first party). Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I've been in WinForms land for a while (unfortunately).
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      Thanks.

jotato 3y ago

The Godot engine. Don't have to build games with it. Gdscript is just as easy as basic, too. I suggest making a weekend app with it and learning