Comment by mikewarot
1 month ago
Please note that we had two independent working low code systems, back in the 1990s.
Back then, a domain expert could fire up either Delphi or Visual Basic 6, and build a program that was useful for them. If they needed more performance, they would hire a professional programmer who used their work as a specification, and sanded off the rough edges.
These days, Lazarus is the open source follow on to Delphi. It'll work almost anywhere. I've run it on a Raspberry Pi Zero W! The only downside is the horrible documentation.
Microsoft went off the rails with their push towards .NET, sadly.
It has been a very long time since I have written any Delphi, but I prefer dotnet these days. The only (very real) problem is trying to predict what the best long term UI option is for native apps.
Yes, it is in the Visual part of Visual Studio that Microsoft has gone off the rails. .Net (C#) is a good development language but Windows Forms being the most usable GUI framework is far from where Microsoft should have gone.
WPF was full of footguns and rigid organization to alleviate said footguns. MVVM (Model, View, Viewmodel) architecture was so much boilerplate and toil to work with. It feels like the advent of Electron-based desktop apps caused MS to simply give up on the space.
I don't have too much experience with MAUI so I can't comment on that.
Blazor's initial bundle sizes made it quite difficult to consider as an option for web applications, despite the ability to share code between frontend and backend.
I still feel like the ASP.NET + Frontend SPA story has a long way to go compared to what is available in the fullstack typescript ecosystem right now. Shared typings between the frontend and backend via tools like tRPC/ oRPC, or full RSC/SSR frameworks like Next and TanStack start are just so much more ergonomic, but the backend TS story, especially in data access and ORMs is so much worse compared to Entity Framework. Prisma is abysmally slow, and Drizzle is getting there but IMO nothing right now compares to the power and DX of EF Core + Linq methods.