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Visual Basic succeeded at this somewhat. There was a market for widgets. You paid for the widgets and your users paid you for the composed application (the user
by discreteevent 3y ago
Visual Basic succeeded at this somewhat. There was a market for widgets. You paid for the widgets and your users paid you for the composed application (the users were not free to recompose it however). But that was in the days when people paid for software
Nowadays people don't pay but it doesn't mean you can't compose things from open source stuff like material UI.
I think that Bracha's point is that it's always been hard for a user to compose apps and make them consistent etc(although VB was much easier than web stuff). But now the AI will compose them so the promise of VB etc could be fully realised. Power to the people.
- AlanYx 3y agoIt really was amazing how large the market was for paid Visual Basic VBX/OCX custom controls (widgets) in the late 90s. This article estimates there were more than 100 companies selling them by 1997: https://www.devx.com/tip-bank/23792/ https://www.devx.com/tip-bank/23792/
- zubairq 3y agoI was looking for information on the VBX/OCX component market just as I was reading your comment! Thanks!
- discreteevent 3y agoI do think that the problem with Bracha saying the AI will compose things is that as Big Dave Thomas once said: "It's important to be able to debug at the level of the abstraction". I'm not sure that even with automatically tested code and even some proof we will ever get away from the need to debug. Dave Thomas was talking about model generated code and models were a much more precise starting point than the prose we input to an AI.