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Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

>You write your interface purely programmatically and it's easy to read afterwards.

Personally, I disagree. For more complex UI, having XML and designer is way better option than writing UI programmatically.

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Complex UI are precisely the place where purely programmatic UI is a time saver.

You are going to need to do A/B testing of UI, code review, testing, accessibility/localization, and a crap ton of composability. All these are a pain when you have XML.

Yep, coming from Delphi, C++ Builder, Forms and quite a few good Java layout designers (Netbeans Matisse), WPF Blend, I never understood what is so cool about doing UIs by hand.

Particularly if you have access to things like custom components (that are themselves designed with a visual designer) and visual form inheritance; these give you back hierarchical compositional tools that you would otherwise lose in a flat composition.

I think the sub second hot reload feature, makes it cool. Have a look at the "Unified layout" section in https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf and or install the flutter plugin in vs code or android studio and have a play.

Makes it cool, but nothing out of the ordinary for anyone used to other native GUI development tools, like the ones I referred to.

Here is Interface Builder in 1986, https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...

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