> You can create a GUI using something like Qt, but the code to make it is messy and unorganized. Having made a very large GUI myself, it gets very cumbersome to manage all of that. Haven't we moved past writing UIs in code about twenty years ago? I see your code samples, and all they look like is an improved version of the code UI creation we had in OWL, MFC, and other UI frameworks on other platforms. Starting abou…
These are interesting points (although I don't quite follow some of your explanations). I've been trying to learn more about the history of GUI development, so I appreciate hearing about how it's been done. Here's an interesting discussion of Delphi (2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543
First, you have a visual form designer: drop a button, resize it, edit the caption, etc.
All objects like buttons, edit boxes etc are classes with properties. They live on a form, another class. The key is object streaming.
The form has instance variables: a private MyButton : TButton, for example, where TButton is the type. This list of fields is autogenerated by the IDE. However, those are created and values set not in code or managed by the IDE, but by loading from a human-readable text stream at runtime (stored as a separate file at designtime, and linked as a resource at compiletime), something like, from memory:
Form : TForm
Button : TButton
Left = 100
Top = 50
Width = 70 // etc
Caption = 'Hello'
OnClick = MyClickHandlerMethod
end;
end;
Your code then is reduced to things like state changes or events - user clicks a button, you write code to do something.
UIs are visual. Writing a complex UI in code is inefficient (manually doing stuff you should not have to do) and with a long modification turnaround time - you can't preview what it looks like, so changes take a long time. The important leap was to design visual elements visually; to stream, so it is OO, diffable, and still human editable if you need to; and to load from a stream via reflection/RTTI.
Delphi did all that in 1995. C++Builder does all that too, in C++! It's beautiful compared even to Qt, and certainly compared to code like the original post, which reads like early nineties techniques to someone used to the above.