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Comment by mexicocitinluez | Hacker News Reader

> The simplicity and efficiency of Visual Basic UI programming relied on several assumptions that became obsolete in 2000

This is a great point that extends beyond rebutting the rose-colored glasses for the gool ole days of programming. While yes, things were simpler. That simplicity came at a cost. For instance, how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities?

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> how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities?

Coincidentally, they were very accessible because they used corresponding Win32 components for all logical UI entities, despite being fixed in layout. Therefore, they worked really well with screen readers.

Sadly, this is not the case with UI frameworks, which render the screen as a Vulcan/DirectX/OpenGL canvas. By the way, for today's Electron-based apps, you can use WAI-ARIA (or similar) standards to achieve a similar level of accessibility.

And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people. No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode support.

"Dark mode" today is the biggest scam - selling us a neutered form of color schemes that used to be a standard feature of any UI toolkit as something new and exciting.

More accessible by default than modern electron-based apps

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