Comment by gzread
15 days ago
Why wouldn't you program a GUI with a GUI if one is available? Avoiding the use of WYSIWYG editors when making GUIs is like avoiding the use of musical instruments when writing songs.
15 days ago
Why wouldn't you program a GUI with a GUI if one is available? Avoiding the use of WYSIWYG editors when making GUIs is like avoiding the use of musical instruments when writing songs.
> Why wouldn't you program a GUI with a GUI if one is available? Avoiding the use of WYSIWYG editors when making GUIs is like avoiding the use of musical instruments when writing songs.
I've been a developer for a long time; I've built pretty large applications in all sorts of technologies and I now just prefer defining GUIs using text. Having a live GUI preview is great but actually dragging and dropping stuff is not more efficient to me.
To fit your analogy, using source code is like writing a song using musical notation. I'll write the song, then play it, and then go back to notation to fix it or expand on it.
In my experience drag-and-drop GUI editors work great until you add the constraint that the window has to be resizeable. Then it becomes a mess of clicking through dialogs for every UI element to make sure the anchoring and display flow is set up correctly, and you often have to go back and redo this whenever you add a new element or change the layout of the form. I think the best GUI programming experience I've ever had is on Palm OS simply because it had the constraint that every program always displayed in fullscreen at 160x160 (pixel-doubled to 320x320 on later devices) so you never had to deal with resizeable windows.
I'm not saying you should never program with a GUI, but it comes at a cost of being able to read the code and tell what the result of the code will be, and all the associated benefits of version control and code reviews that you lose.
And as a side-effect of that, merge conflicts become murder when your "Fix right-hand margins" commit with a 20 line readable +/- diff instead becomes a 1000 line +/- diff.
The one time I built an iOS app using the xCode IB so that I could get up to speed more quickly, I really came to regret it several years into the project.
If this is a real issue, it seems to be an issue with the way a particular toolkit handles visual WYSIWYG editors. Lazarus serializes the object properties into a simple and readable text format that follows the class declarations themselves and you can easily diff them. E.g. here is the diff of a minor change i did (added a new button in a panel with an event handler and modified a property in an existing button):
https://i.imgur.com/aHMHqSc.png
Handling merges (and other VCS functions) is also simple since you can edit the file manually if needed.
I swear I meant to write an "often" in my previous post. But yeah, that was largely directed at the interface builder in xCode, for iOS - it gives you storyboard/xib files that are effectively-not-human-editable (and entirely non-mergeable) xml.
Visual Studio and XCode are way, way overkill for most software and eventually constraining for bigger projects too.
I would say having a good hot reload system gives you the benefit of wysiwyg with more readable code
> Avoiding the use of WYSIWYG editors when making GUIs is like avoiding the use of musical instruments when writing songs.
And yet, most songwriters write the song, they don't record themselves playing notes.
I encourage you to listen to the Song Exploder podcast to learn about how songwriters write songs.