Ask HN: What to use for desktop apps for Windows or Mac?
3 by MaxGripe | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I remember how about 20 years ago, during the first semester of IT studies, when we were learning the basics of programming, we could grab Charles Petzold's book, launch Visual C#, and create a simple UI application with Windows.Forms in just a few minutes. No prior knowledge needed, purely intuitive. Later, in a similar fashion, it was just as easy to launch Expression Blend (or whatever it was called back then) for Silverlight and quickly build a UI for a Windows Phone. A friend of mine even converted my app to Android without any issues. Today, when I tried to build an extremely simple UI application using Avalonia with F#, I needed many hours of help from ChatGPT and Perplexity, and even then, I didn't achieve anything remarkable. Can anyone explain what has happened that makes building a simple UI 20 times harder after 20 years??? Maybe using F# for UI is a terrible mistake, and there are more pleasant technologies for building UI easily nowadays? Can someone advise me on what's used today for quick UI development? Perhaps Python with Tkinter? Swift? Dart with Flutter? Or is it simply no longer as easy as it used to be, and it's bound to be HARDCORE difficult now? BTW: Please, I beg you, don't tell me to try MAUI - I've already read enough to know it's not worth touching, even with a ten-foot pole