UI debugging tools in the web are amazing. I can inspect the entire DOM, add code to test some new concepts, edit layout and get instant results.

To my knowledge, almost no native UI libraries have good support for CSS-style selectors. Being able to write out selection rules like "odd elements in this kind of list of elements" is extremely useful.

This is going to sound silly, but almost no native UI toolkit has a good "screenshots" section on its website. Meanwhile you go over to Bootstrap and you see stuff you actually recognize. This is important! It proves that you can actually make nice looking things.

Stuff like interface designers shipped by MSFT are pretty great though.

UI tools for the web are amazaingly horrible. I can’t imagine anyone who thinks the chrome debugger is better than debugging .net in visual studios, while, if you want, XAML has most of the things that CSS has (but I do mostly canvas on both platforms).

Programming for the web makes me feel like I’m back in the 90s, no even Java/Swing was easier. I get making the sacrifice if it means I can run in the browser, but not otherwise.

I didn't do that much Swing, but the feedback loop for UI design in the web definitely felt a lot easier.

I have fond memories of debugging C# with Msft tools, but I also suffered a decent amount on the debugging cycle in C/C++. Being able to just patch in some new code without going through a whole compile/set up the environment again is very useful.

I can understand thinking that the foundation of the web is bad, therefore web development is bad. But I would take the chrome debugger experience over C/PHP/Java debugging experience most days of the week.

(That being said, I could simply be unaware of some debugging tools in that space that make things nicer)

Java supported hot code replacement since 2000 or so, they actually had/have a fairly decent implementation (better than .net). But since they didn’t have a declarative DOM representation, it would be hard pressed to use it to add or remove elements. JavaFX fixed that, but that effort failed completely.

Doing UI in C/C++ sucks, but that was also true in the 90s.

Chrome is a horrible debugger from a UI design perspective. Debugging through VSCode is better, but I still miss simple things like auto toString displays. Surely the tools could get much better, that they haven’t is depressing.

CSS is so crappy that I wouldn't be able to get anything done without the devtools. On the other hand with most native GUI libraries I've never had a problem to get the layout I wanted.

Every time I have to frig around with debugging a new-fangled JS SPA UI, it makes me want to hurt whoever is responsible for bringing the industry to this state. It was easier in VB6. It's miles easier to but something decent together, that actually works, in .net WinForms.

imo React and Css rocks hard, I don't like .NET because Visual Studio, and I love js, css, html because Visual Code. Also metatags are what user interface design should have been since always, and there is nothing better for that than html and react. Yes sure, you have wpf and uwp (both using xaml), but they are no near as good.

Reactive UI is easier to reason about I'd say. One thing I'd like to see is a native reactive UI framework that would be thought as such from the ground up. So far react on web is a whole bunch of hacks and react native also wraps classic UI elements.