Reminder: the sudden nostalgia for VB (and Flash) is not because VB was good, it’s because VB was:

• Better than most other things available at the time for rapid application development.
• Impressive compared to the abilities of the hardware it ran on.
• Better than most things that came after it for low-effort software development.

We don’t need resurrected VB or Flash, we need something that takes advantage of the power of modern computers to deliver something that has the same ease of use of these tools.

@david_chisnall
we both: rapid application development needs its comeback!
*monkey paw curls*
everyone out there "you can write your code using AI, without any computer proficiency at all"

not like that :(

@david_chisnall Tcl/Tk would like a word.

(The big problem with VB from my memory was the inability to abstract, or even loop, over UI elements. If you have N items in a list and so need N copies of a widget, that was a puzzle in VB but obvious in Tk).

@freddy @david_chisnall I think @mhoye phrased this problem really well here:

https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116776977239588631

@freddy

I was on a panel for the Psychology of Programming Special Interest Group in, I think, 2018 (the other panelist who wasn’t a paper author was Tony Hoare, which wasn’t intimidating at all). Back then, I posed the question to the audience: is the rise of ML in programming a sign that we’ve failed at making easy to use programming systems? (My trick for panels is to ask the audience questions so they talk to each other and don’t expect me to know stuff).

I still see it as a strong indication. Alan Blackwell, who was one of the organisers, has since written a book on that thesis.

@david_chisnall @freddy I looked up the book, FTR: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548717/moral-codes/

@david_chisnall Delphi is always chronically overlooked. I never got to use it much, VB was more common at work in the late 90’s, but Delphi took everything VB did but made it a lot more powerful

@sinbad

A lot of things were nicer in Delphi, but Delphi was also more of a 'real' programming language underneath. That was great for people who wanted to be software engineers, but was worse for people who didn't. Part of the strength of VB was that BASIC is very, very easy to learn.

@david_chisnall I do wonder how the output of such a tool should look like these days, though. That was one of the major issues of a lot of the prior art, sometimes intentional (HyperCard), sometimes more by accident (Tcl/Tk).

Regular "HIG" GUIs had the advantage that you could follow a lot of patterns, so you just needed to overcome not being a "proper" programmer, not also not being a designer.

These days, those kind of UIs are basically retrocomputing, and you either get some flashy web page or something on the desktop that is increasingly Blender-ized.

Hard to find a niche for end-user programmers there, even if the purely technical issues are resolved.

@mhd Yup, the industry as a whole has taken some big steps back in walking away from decades of usability research in favour of marketing-driven UIs. I don't have a solution to that.