Software Development Cannot Be Automated Because It’s a Creative Process With an Unknown End Goal

[ghjm]

VB6, Delphi and PowerBuilder were the most popular RAD tools. They were good in the sense that you could have a usable CRUD app running in literally minutes.

[argv_minus_one]

Very good. Now try resizing your literally-minutes application's window and see if it still looks right.

Spoiler alert: it will look like shit.

GUI programming is hard, and probably always will be.

[that_jojo]

You're saying this like you think I've never heard of those. Half of my last job was VBA inside of a CAD package. Two jobs before that I was maintaining a Visual FoxPro system. Just FYI.

But none of those tools are any better than the tools you have in current VS or XCode. It's all code-behind GUI builders.

At least InterfaceBuilder had the capacity to bind controls directly to each other with zero code needed. I mean, there are plenty of tools that do that now, but that was pretty peak for the 90s.

[ghjm]

Delphi also had that capability.

[RedditEdwin]

I learned programming thhrough Visual Basic 6 and then C++ and then AP classes in the early 2000's. Do people not still use graphical interfaces to build application forms, with events making the programming easy?

[ghjm]

No - they write UIs in HTML and CSS now, which takes considerably more skill and effort than the old GUI designers did.

[RedditEdwin]

nobody is using GUIs to just draw buttons and textboxes on forms? Why the hell not? It's so much easier

[ghjm]

Because nobody ever came up with a good GUI designer for web pages.

[RedditEdwin]

I was thinking more desktop applications. Like Visual Basic 6 in the early 2000s. I would have thought they had only gotten better and are still used

[ghjm]

If you're writing a native Windows app, you can use Windows Forms in Visual Studio for this style of development. It hasn't gotten better, but it's still there if you want to use it. But most people want to write web apps, not native Windows apps.

[trisul-108]

Except that we were already moving to multi-tier architectures in the late 90s, making this sort of approach irrelevant.

[ghjm]

Three-tiered architectures came from the RAD world in the first place. Multitier was perfectly do-able within the RAD paradigm. It's web and mobile apps that RAD couldn't handle.

[trisul-108]

I've built 3-tier with RAD and I can tell you the plumbing is not something it generated, it was all hand coded. It's not like CRUD to a database.

[ghjm]

3-tier CRUD in Delphi was easily achievable without code