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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, Visual Basic. Has anything since allowed non-programmers to build a GUI as easily as that? Just drag and drop, then double click the button and follow the on-screen prompts to glue it all together. It gets a lot of shit from real developers, but what can match it?

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I did Visual Basic and MS Access programming mostly in the late 1990s. Upscaling to SQL Server when the database grew too large etc.

IBM OS/2 had a Parts Workbench that was easier than Visual Basic and Borland had Delphi based on Object Pascal.

Ruby on Rails comes close and Python is the new Visual Basic for a new generation of programmers now.

Rails and Python are fine, I've used both of them extensively, but they are no comparison to VB in any way. Sure they're easy enough to use, but it's all 100% pure code. The biggest benefit of VB was the interface was not coded, it was drawn. There's no way to do that with Rails or Python.

That sounds like a startup idea. Make ROR and Python have an IDE as easy to use as the VB IDE.

https://www.xojo.com

Been around for a long time, was formerly called RealBASIC.

QtCreator has a similar feeling too it, albeit using much more convoluted language.

Delphi, Borland's response to VB but with a saner programming language, with AOT compilation to native code (VB only got it on version 6).

I would agree with you on the Winforms portion of the .Net universe.

None of the other parts of the .Net universe are comparable, though; most are either kind of clunky (Webforms) or require a much bigger learning curve to get going.

creating a gui in labview is pretty trivial.

Delphi.

And it's Open Source "brother", Lazarus.

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