I too did Windows desktop software with good GUIs using nothing more than MS Visual C++/MFC/ATL and David Kruglinski/Charles Petzold's books (no Internet). There was a learning curve but not too difficult. Later on i moved onto Networking and learnt client/server distributed programming. But when i see what is going on in the Web GUI space i am truly lost. It all seems to be duct-tape and junk. A simple document sharing protocol has been munged to do anything/everything, an ad-hoc language (i.e. JS) has become de-facto GUI language and every kludge under the sun has been employed in the service of event-driven programming just to make something work. This is not Engineering but the very worst of Hacking in the full pejorative sense of the word.
I too did Windows desktop software with good GUIs using nothing more than MS Visual C++/MFC/ATL and David Kruglinski/Charles Petzold's books (no Internet). There was a learning curve but not too difficult. Later on i moved onto Networking and learnt client/server distributed programming. But when i see what is going on in the Web GUI space i am truly lost. It all seems to be duct-tape and junk. A simple document sharing protocol has been munged to do anything/everything, an ad-hoc language (i.e. JS) has become de-facto GUI language and every kludge under the sun has been employed in the service of event-driven programming just to make something work. This is not Engineering but the very worst of Hacking in the full pejorative sense of the word.