Comment by mpweiher

> Some languages just feel incredibly natural and frictionless for certain things, and nobody has really nailed UIs yet.

Emphatically yes. If you look at books written about the problem in the early 90s[1], they are still applicable today.

> The current solutions, although I find it hard to describe precisely, are always tantalizingly lacking in one way or another.

The best analysis of this I have seen so far is in Chatty's Programs = Data + Algorithms + Architecture: consequences for interactive software engineering [2]. It's a bit hard to get through, but absolutely worth it.

As a short summary, the problem is architectural, or more specifically linguistic/architectural mismatch: the architecture our "general purpose" programming languages induces, which is the call/return architectural style, does not match the architecture required for user interfaces, but rather conflicts with that style.

I also wrote about it in Can Programmers Escape the Gentle Tyranny of call/return?.

My current approach is to first build a programming language that can easily express alternative architectural styles: Objective-Smalltalk [4].

With that I am now working an a UI framework I call interscript, including HTMXNative and other goodies.

It seems to be working out...

[1] For example, Languages for developing user interfaces by Myers et al https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/books/mono/download?id...

[2] https://opendl.ifip-tc6.org/db/conf/ehci/ehci2007/Chatty07.p...

[3] https://2020.programming-conference.org/details/salon-2020-p...

[4] https://objective.st