> classical RAD from the late 90s early 00s.

RAD, a.k.a. UI-nailed-down-to-pixel-grid approach, has died immediately after we've switched from 640x480 pixel screens to variety of display and devices.

If in doubts think about Adaptive and Responsive Designs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design ) in regards of RAD.

But that's not a limitation of RAD. Delphi 4 and Visual Basic both had "align and/or resize proportionally" on all axis.

Making an UI that adapted in size from 640 to 1280 was a 4 clicks matter.

Having COMPLETLY SEPARATE UI for different form factor like we need on the web sure, but that shouldn't be an issue on mobile just pack X version of your UI like you end up doing with all your resources anyway.

> RAD, a.k.a. UI-nailed-down-to-pixel-grid approach

That's really not what RAD was about.

RAD was about "every single component you use is generic, you don't care how it works, you only want to say where it is, what event you listen to, and optionally do some custom rendering".

As said above, positionning could be non-fixed, auto-adapted to the view, ...

Only for the clueless developers that never bothered to learn how to use layout managers.

Delphi is still around and they do let you drag and drop a mobile layout and target ios and android. I don't know anyone using it though.

Delphi scene is still quite active in Germany, enough to keep getting articles on the Windows and .NET developer related magazines, and a yearly conference.

Delphi suffers from the mismanagement from all its owners, and given its target market, you will usually see it being used across corporations that don't think twice about paying for SAP and Oracle licenses.

its a real shame too because the pascal langauge is quite nice and would hold its own against zig or c++. I would even learn the free version and potentially invest in the paid version if it ran on osx or linux. Anything thats windows only is a hard no for me.

You can still help improve and contribute to FreePascal and Lazarus on that case.

One problem is that in larger teams, text descriptions that play nicely with version control are much easier to manage. You can review changes, you can share code etc.

It's not dead though - C# development still has Visual Studio and it can be pretty good.

For iOS and macOS there is Interface Builder that is somewhat like that. It seems to have fallen out of favour. I‘m not really sure why but I know I prefer developing code based UI as well.

The issue most people seem to have with IB/Storyboards is that they're incredibly difficult for multiple people to work on. They're huge, dense XML files, so trying to solve a merge conflict is a challenge to say the least.

It's been a long while since I've done much iOS dev but I also recall when learning Storyboards that there were lots of things that just seemed half baked or poorly thought out.

For example, the only way to set a corner radius from the UI was to type the key-path of the layer property into a "Runtime Attributes" input, in a totally separate tab from the rest of the visual properties.

I also recall headaches over things like setting the colour of the status bar, or titles on Navigation controllers, where the runtime value would often be different to what IB showed for some reason.