I don't know if it's the rose tinted glasses of looking into the past as I'm getting old but I really feel we missed something along the way on the transition between desktop to web and now mobile.
I remember how approachable Delphi and VB6 were for me as a 12-year-old who loved computers, everything was set up so you could just get things done. You didn't have to choose a UI library, a database layer, a build system with transpiling chains, or a particular language stack. You could focus solely on writing the code that solved your specific problem.
Now, when I try to teach my child how to code, I struggle to keep him interested because we spend so much time dealing with dependencies problems, boilerplate or having too many choices, none of which have anything to do with the actual goal of what we're trying to do.
I don't know, maybe Javascript or Python might take this place one day?
Something is definitely lost, I'd unpopularly argue with FLASH too. You could just start templateing with VB6 and Delphi, etc, and then start writing specific code or script blobs as needed.
Tools today seem like a hot mess, perhaps more powerful, but much less... human
I remember how approachable Delphi and VB6 were for me as a 12-year-old who loved computers, everything was set up so you could just get things done. You didn't have to choose a UI library, a database layer, a build system with transpiling chains, or a particular language stack. You could focus solely on writing the code that solved your specific problem.
Now, when I try to teach my child how to code, I struggle to keep him interested because we spend so much time dealing with dependencies problems, boilerplate or having too many choices, none of which have anything to do with the actual goal of what we're trying to do.
I don't know, maybe Javascript or Python might take this place one day?