I didn't do that much Swing, but the feedback loop for UI design in the web definitely felt a lot easier.

I have fond memories of debugging C# with Msft tools, but I also suffered a decent amount on the debugging cycle in C/C++. Being able to just patch in some new code without going through a whole compile/set up the environment again is very useful.

I can understand thinking that the foundation of the web is bad, therefore web development is bad. But I would take the chrome debugger experience over C/PHP/Java debugging experience most days of the week.

(That being said, I could simply be unaware of some debugging tools in that space that make things nicer)

Java supported hot code replacement since 2000 or so, they actually had/have a fairly decent implementation (better than .net). But since they didn’t have a declarative DOM representation, it would be hard pressed to use it to add or remove elements. JavaFX fixed that, but that effort failed completely.

Doing UI in C/C++ sucks, but that was also true in the 90s.

Chrome is a horrible debugger from a UI design perspective. Debugging through VSCode is better, but I still miss simple things like auto toString displays. Surely the tools could get much better, that they haven’t is depressing.