• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    I moved from Visual Basic (3 no less!) to C because I needed to optimize the performance of a software synthesis (like, sound synthesis) application I was developing at the time (mid-1990s). It boggles my mind to this day how much fucking work you had to do just to create a simple window in C. It instantly made clear why UIs at the time were so bad and I went back to Visual Basic for the UI with a compiled C DLL to do the heavy lifting.

    There’s no excuse for why UIs are still so bad today.

    • lordbritishbusiness@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      The “excuse” is more or less the 20 or so replacements that have been made and died. I think Microsoft alone is responsible for 5 over the life of Windows.

      We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML only because it’s already wide spread. But it’s not perfect so more standards for the standards pile. Don’t worry, react will end up buried by the next thing on the pile eventually.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        We’ve more or less kinda settled on HTML

        It’s funny, one of the modern UI glitches that I hate the most is when a long bit of text is just truncated with ellipses instead of the whole thing being shown and you have to hold the mouse over to get it in a tooltip, or shudder actually click on the thing. HTML is great at word-wrapping and allowing the whole UI to “flow” with variable heights and widths as necessary - and yet that is never allowed to happen in apps.