As much as I hate modern frontend code, I question this narrative. What 20 year old GUI library is running circles around... anything?

There’s another discussion going on about how the older layers of Windows you dig into, the more useful the UI gets, perhaps that’s the narrative they’re thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34216619

I’m inclined to agree, older UI toolkits could make plenty productive UIs. But they aren’t good at following yearly evolving design fads, and webpages tend to lean heavily toward marketing and appearances over being more utilitarian.

Older toolkits were great at single team creations. This, interestingly, did mean the person making it knew exactly how to use test it.

I question whether the toolkits were actually better, or we just had fewer things to use test? Certainly fewer form factors. Granted, the decision to try and have a single code base for many different resolutions and such is, of course, questionable.

Edit: directly to the point, is it the old toolkits that made better tools? Are those same toolkits used today? Pointing at older tools does not show that the toolkits were better.

Cocoa (macOS) for example

And what modern applications written with it are running circles? Legit question.

Almost all of the apps bundled with macOS are written in Cocoa (some are written in Cocoa Touch, which is itself a nearly 15-year-old framework). And a great deal of excellent third-party apps -- off the top of my head, Transmit, Pixelmator, Day One, the Omni Group apps.

The bundled apps feels like an odd claim. I don't think of many of those that feel modern. That said, I'm probably not thinking of the right ones.

Will try to take a peek at the rest of this list. I don't, oddly, use that many native Mac applications.

> I don't think of many of those that feel modern.

This is a bit interesting to me, which bundled apps don't feel modern to you? Mail, Notes, Pages, Safari... they all seem modern enough to me.

Mail has always felt like garbage to me. Notes, I will have to give a try again. Though, really, the entire "office suites" that everyone makes always feels off to me. I will full cede that that is just preference.

Safari feels off, as well. But I'm pretty firmly in camp firefox.

When I think bundled apps, I think of their notepad equivalent. The finder. The calculator. And... that is about it. I remember trying to make a script once, and that script editor left me very very lost.

Django, bootstrap and a sprinkling of jQuery works really well and results in simple code that can be maintained by a single dev. Bootstrap is only 11 years old. jQuery is 15 years old. Django is 18 years old.

jQuery is used by 94% of the websites that use JavaScript.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library

None of those are gui toolkits, though. At best, you are pointing to html working rather well at it. Though, that is more force of will from developers, as html was specifically not a front end toolkit at the outset.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

Is there an 10+ year old framework that does responsive UIs well?

Is there a younger one? :)

Yes, the web. Responsive by design.

I thought the challenge was for one that does it well? :D

What's the point of having a responsive UI?

There's always the option of a native client rather than a web-based client. A good example from days gone by is Evernote. If you've only started using it recently you might not know this, but the client used to be really good.

I haven't used QT or BCGSoft, but I for one have very negative memories of MFC. Sure the performance was much better than anything you get on the web, but the UIs were far less complex, didn't handle window resizing well/at all, handled text overflow poorly, and had much less aggressive design requirements than we have today. There was also a ton of imperative glue code and lots of hard-to-read generated code.

Less complex UI, interesting: https://bcgsoft.com/galleries.htm

Please DO open Word 97 (and this is 26 years old UI) and compare it with the best done web UI you are aware of, regardless of framework, as long it is not QT compiled into webasm (as this is the only thing in web that comes close).

My understanding is that none of the core Microsoft apps like Office were built on MFC. In MFC projects I worked on, generally the simple stuff was built with MFC and anything more complex was built with the win32 API.

Actually MFC uses windows api, but this does not change anything, it is still 1997 API. And we are in year 2023 with worse UI, i would expect it to be in reverse.

"generally the simple stuff", no:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/media/mfc_heirarchy...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/media/mfc_heirarchy...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/mfc/media/mfc_heirarchy...

MFC had its set of problems which were related to things like passing messages between windows, but all those are on another level.

Agreed. Perhaps a bit radical, but we should get rid of GUI altogether and enforce that new applications should be command-line driven.