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RAD died because it could only cover 98% of business needs and idiot managers thought they needed a language to deal with 100% and so threw away really great tools.

I could fully foresee VB making a comeback in the future.



RAD never really died, we just stopped calling it that.

But open Visual Studio today, and create a new Windows XAML app, then open the form designer. You can still drag a button from the toolbox, move it around, then double-click it to wire up an event handler - exactly like it was in VB6. In fact, it's quite possible to ignore all the modern stuff like data bindings entirely, and just manually read and update all widgets, as a typical VB/Delphi app did.


A typical Delphi app might have done that, but a selling point of Delphi was that it had data binding.

Connect the TDB* vies to a TDataSource, and it would show the values of a database, without requiring manual updates.


VB6 and WinForms also had data binding. But in practice I've rarely seen it used, except for data grids.


WPF has databinding available today, it's not gone away.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop-wpf/data/dat...


For WPF, data binding is idiomatic. It wasn't back in those days.

My point is basically that the tooling that we use for desktop UI development is still very much rooted in the RAD era - but as best practices around it changed, we dropped the "RAD" label. It was a gradual evolution, though.




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