Reply to post: Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

All other engineering disciplines are using software tools to make their lives dramatically easier, whilst the software industry keeps messing it up. Why?

I don't know, apart from perhaps blaming the two easiest targets - the general dubious competence levels in newer software development, coupled with the "NIH" syndrome that has always seemed to be present.

From a once-RISC OS, now MacOS (macOS) / iOS developer perspective, Interface Builder's fast and simple operation went backwards with the much slower and buggier Storyboard stuff in XCode, but at least it was still graphical. IMHO Apple's more recent move to Swift UI seems to have been a big backwards step, at least if a graphical design approach were to be dropped and leave only the code-writing option - which bewilderingly, many people seem to want to happen. Notwithstanding the dreadful documentation and bugs, it's just *much* more effort and producing something that actually looks good is, uuh, challenging to say the least.

I've frequently read a rationale concerning code reviews. You can easily diff UI-written-in-code, but can't easily diff the output of a visual tool. This is a shortcoming of the diff engine of course, not a shortcoming of the generation tool. In any case, if you've ever done a code review where someone's modified a bunch of XUL, or CSS, or even Swift UI code, you'll know that for all but the most trivial changes, you're very unlikely to have any clear idea of exactly how those changes will manifest visually, or whether or not this will produce a desired outcome; nor can you be too sure if there are reuses somewhere which could mean that the innocent looking change in a diff actually has wider impacts. There are no silver bullets. A diff tool that understood the output of the visual editor system and could respond with an appropriately visual diff, on the other hand - that would be valuable.

There are times and a places for UI components expressed in hand-written code or markup languages, of course, but the lack of good tools for things like desktop or mobile app development outside of the Apple ecosystem has always surprised me.