I was really surprised when I went and wanted to build a GUI app to find that everyone had abandoned the WYSIWG model completely. You can't just drag your controls over, set their properties, then build the code to drive everything. You have to manually wrestle with containers and whatnot even for desktop things. I could potentially see it as an acceptable tradeoff for wide device compatibility (things with substantially different screen dimensions, etc)... but I still have yet to figure out why the layout systems of the past couldn't simply be made a little bit smart to deduce the constraints necessary to result in the same development experience as before.

I've come to believe that some number of developers actually like it the hard way. It's the only explanation that makes sense. We have gone so far backward in GUI development tools.

WPF still works nicely for prototyping in a visual editor. Declarative is much more robust than the old imperative awt/swing/winforms.

MS had nothing on Sun’s Dev Guide, the easiest and best GUI dev tool i’ve ever seen.

I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...

do you have any pointers for learning about it? Looking up "Sun Dev Guide" didn't seem to find me anything related to GUI editors.

And what I don't understand is how the same people managed to get it completely wrong with WPF 10y later, with an extremely convoluted syntax, no autocomplete, poor tooling, etc

The milenials never learned it because Web is so cool!

MS tools are still here for those of us doing native Windows development.

Also the Apple and Google GUI tooling for their mobile OSes are quite good.