alt Hacker NewsIt’s so very ironic that your comment appears on this particular post. We had a much better version of this with interface builder on NeXT in the late 1980s (and later Mac OS X). Similar tooling existed for DOS and Windows.
You literally laid out your UI in a WYSIWYG, drag and dropped connections to your code, and had something working on day one.
It was even easier than the web, because what you were laying out were full components with code and UI and behavior. The web still hasn’t caught up with that fully.
When I see comments like these, I better understand why old timers shake their fist at the youngsters reinventing the wheel badly because they don’t understand what came before.
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>We had a much better version of this with interface builder on NeXT in the late 1980s (and later Mac OS X)
I don’t disagree, that just wasn’t available as a starting to program option when my generation started learning around 2005. If it still existed, it was way too niche for me to know about as a beginner.
And I don’t include myself in the generation that started programming through JS, I went the console route a bit earlier. But I have seen friends enter programming later on and it’s clear why that is the main choice.
Microsoft broke every single one of those tools. And made their own that would never work in a competing OS.
If you are looking for somebody to shake your fist at, try the market protection agencies all over the world.
It always felt like a huge miss to me that Microsoft didn’t bring Access to the web and/or mobile apps. For all its flaws, it was a simple drag-and-drop editor that almost anyone could use to build simple apps that could power decent-sized businesses.