Back in the early 2000s, innovation in software development was booming. IDEs actually helped you build stuff. You had Visual Component Libraries, drag and drop interfaces, proper GUIs. Visual Basic, Delphi, .NET and the one and only Xcode. When I read about these tools or watch videos, it feels like toolmakers were on fire.
https://marcgg.com/blog/2024/01/05/editor-history/
And then web development came along, and it was like big tech companies hit the reset button.
We went from powerful visual environments to Notepad++. From proper tooling to writing jQuery by hand and praying it didn't break somewhere else.
FrontPage. Dreamweaver. Director. Flash! Say what you want, but at least they tried to give developers a proper workflow. Then Facebook ditched all of it for the purity of the web and pretended that coding everything by hand was somehow noble.
Facebook dropped the bar so low that anything remotely decent, like Sublime Text or Atom felt revolutionary. And Visual Studio? It's called Visual but where are the visual components? Why do devs have to write React components by hand in 2025?
Apple gave us Xcode. Microsoft gave us Visual Basic and .NET. Adobe gave us Director and Flash. Google gave us Chrome and Android Studio. And Facebook gave us a bunch of text files called React... and a massive headache.
What happened to building tools that make developers more productive? Web developers had to wait 20 years for a new wave of toolmakers to show up: OpenAI and Anthropic. It's like these two companies were created just to put devs out of their misery.
Did I mentioned that in React you still have to write CSS by hand?
From a software development point of view, Facebook has been one of the most disappointing companies in the history of web and mobile.
pier25•4h ago