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Comment by ModernMech | Hacker News Reader

> but I also think the correct modern day analog of that is the browser.

The browser is exactly what I had in mind when I said "you have to learn a stack of languages". Sure, okay, console.log() gets you "hello world", but so does "echo" so maybe I placed the bar too low. Still, getting into the modern web experience requires you to learn HTML + CSS + Javascript and how they relate and interop.

Fast forward a little bit from the BASIC days to Visual Basic. Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. I don't see how the browser world is easier or more approachable than that.

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Agreed - the browser leaves much to be desired as an accessible dev platform, and the web as a whole is even worse! (Why do I need to learn HTML, CSS, JS, Python, SQL and React/Redux/Bootstrap/Flash/SQLAlchemy just to get started?! And that's not mentioning Webpack, AWS, shell scripting...).

We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like programming environment for the web - it's got one language (Python), drag'n'drop design, built in database, actual working autocompletion - the works: https://anvil.works.

Would love to hear what you think!

Well," Back then you could write a desktop application with a GUI, controls, a window, and needed one language and one environment. " you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work.

Also, if you want, you can write GUI in the browser without html/css, with the canvas element. There are frameworks for that, not sure how mature they are, though.

> you still had to learn the different gui frameworks and how they work.

No you didn't, it was built into the VB editor; you just dragged and dropped elements into a window frame, then edited callback functions. You didn't have to leave VB at all or learn any other language or framework.

Ah ok, I never used VB. I experienced that with Delphi ... and much more elaborate with Adobes Flex(or more beautiful, but less clean, with Flash), which is pretty dead nowdays unfortunately and I have not found a replacement. Any tool which tried to do this for HTML has been horrible so far.

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