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Back in the 90s you could drag and drop a vb6 applet in Microsoft word. Somehow we’ve regressed..

Edit: for the young, wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) was common for all sorts of languages from c++ to Delphi to html. You could draw up anything you wanted. Many had native bindings to data sources of all kinds. My favourite was actually HyperCard because I learned it in grade school.



Wysiwyg kind of fell apart once we had to stop assuming everyone had an 800x600 or 1024x768 screen, because what you saw was no longer what others got.


Not entirely, in these RAD tools you also had flexible layout choices and obviously you could test it for various window sizes (although the maximum was the one supported by your graphics card). Too bad many chose the lazy way and just enforced fixed window size at 800x600.


Most of the internet still assumes you're using a 96 DPI monitor. Tho the rise of mobile phone has changed that it seems like the vast majority of the content consumed on mobile lends itself to being scaled to any DPI - eg.. movies, pictures, youtube ect.


Not a big issue with QT layouts (still have to test the result though)


I can imagine adding breakpoints to a wysiwyg editor being not terribly difficult. They decouple presentation from logic pretty well.


I still miss my days of programming Visual Basic 6. Nothing since then ever compares.


4gl or RAD is still here, but now it’s called low- or no-code.




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