On accessibility: I see more custom components that nobody cares to make it properly working with keyboard interaction compared to native HTML input components.
On standards - mixed feelings: we had XHTML, now we don’t. We had IE and jQuery to deal with it, now we don’t need it, but I still see many places that have the old “works best with” message, now with Chrome instead.
On maintainable code: it’s a different shit show, we exchanged spaghetti code for billions of npm dependencies that break if you dare to try and upgrade something.
The ultimate RAD was Windows Forms, in my opinion. It's been downhill ever since.
Remember how you could just "add" a database connection to your project, plop a data source on a form, then a datagrid or a bunch of text/check/comboboxes and the standard control, wire it all up in a couple clicks, and things just magically worked?
That was a lovely time to work on any kind of line-of-business app.
> Remember how you could just "add" a database [...] and things just magically worked?
You can do these in both Delphi and Lazarus, except with a much better GUI framework (comparing GUI only here, not everything you'd get with .NET). If anything having worked with Windows Forms for a while i think it was abandoned before it reached even what you could do in the midlate 90s in Delphi.
Data source on the form idea originated from Borland Delphi. Later, Anders Hejlsberg quit Borland to work at Microsoft, where he implemented the idea of visual and non-visual components and property editors in .net
You would be even more impressed with Delphi, because after connecting your data source, your form fills with data at design-time. Lazarus and Typhon does the same.
C# 1.0 was, to a significant extent, Delphi with a Java-like syntax (which is no wonder given who designed it), and WinForms is so much like VCL, often the only difference is the presence or absence of the "T" prefix.
By now C# is a much more powerful language, though.
You can compile Qt to target the browser instead of native apps. But besides seeing a demo I don't know how good it is with performances, accessibility and so on.
