We are also losing the joy of hacking together software by not adapting - or sometimes abandoning - useful development paradigms.
I just tried to develop a simple CRUD-style database UI for a mechanical hobby project. Being on the backend/systems side of the spectrum, for the UI I decided "yeah, considering I work on a Mac now, and there's no such thing as WinForms here, let's quickly throw together something small with python and tkinter". God, that was a mistake and lead to both suffering and lost days which I did not work on the main project on.
How is it that in 2025, we still do not have some sort of Rapid Application Development tool for Mac? How do we still not have some sort of tool that allows us to just drag a database table into a window, and we have basic DB functionality in that window's app? Jobs demonstrated that capability in the NeXT demo, Visual Studio has been doing it for decades, so has Delphi. But on Mac?
Swift is a train wreck, tkinter is like painting a picture with yourself being blindfolded, Qt does a lot of things right, but has a funky license model I am not comfortable with - and has pain points of its own.
I eventually coughed up the 100 bucks and got a Xojo license ... now I am working in BASIC, for the first time since 1992 - but it has an interface designer. For a massive boost in usability, I have to get back into a language I wished to forget a long time ago.
And that does not spark joy.
Yes, bloat is bad. Yes, I too make fun of people who have to import some nom package to check whether a number is odd or even.
But sometimes, you are not Michelangelo, chiselling a new David. Sometimes, you just need a quick way to do something small. Actively preventing me from achieving that by refusing to go with the times is destructive.
Yes, but it appears that FileMaker only works with their cloud-based DB these days, and I really like my data to stay at home, in something like SQLIte or a NAS-hosted MySQL - mostly so I can directly interface my self-designed scanning/photography/sorting bot to it.
I just tried to develop a simple CRUD-style database UI for a mechanical hobby project. Being on the backend/systems side of the spectrum, for the UI I decided "yeah, considering I work on a Mac now, and there's no such thing as WinForms here, let's quickly throw together something small with python and tkinter". God, that was a mistake and lead to both suffering and lost days which I did not work on the main project on.
How is it that in 2025, we still do not have some sort of Rapid Application Development tool for Mac? How do we still not have some sort of tool that allows us to just drag a database table into a window, and we have basic DB functionality in that window's app? Jobs demonstrated that capability in the NeXT demo, Visual Studio has been doing it for decades, so has Delphi. But on Mac?
Swift is a train wreck, tkinter is like painting a picture with yourself being blindfolded, Qt does a lot of things right, but has a funky license model I am not comfortable with - and has pain points of its own.
I eventually coughed up the 100 bucks and got a Xojo license ... now I am working in BASIC, for the first time since 1992 - but it has an interface designer. For a massive boost in usability, I have to get back into a language I wished to forget a long time ago.
And that does not spark joy.
Yes, bloat is bad. Yes, I too make fun of people who have to import some nom package to check whether a number is odd or even.
But sometimes, you are not Michelangelo, chiselling a new David. Sometimes, you just need a quick way to do something small. Actively preventing me from achieving that by refusing to go with the times is destructive.