Part of my day job is maintaining and expanding a Win32 / MFC / C++ / C app I originally wrote over 25 years ago. It works well, a couple thousand people use it every day and say nice things, and it’s backwards compatible to XP, which some of our clients still have.

This week, I started exploring a re-write, using modern Windows languages and frameworks, with the idea than surely — surely — things have become significantly less complex in the last couple of decades.

Oh.

Oh, no.

Oh, God, no.

@gknauss About every two years, I think: “I’ll take a look at the latest Windows desktop app development situation. It MUST have regained some sanity by now.”

I’m…still looking.

I have very fond memories of the old VB6 days. Limited, yes. But it was so much easier to get started, and the programming model made sense.

It seems that app development complexity has grown unimpeded while overall app quality has gotten worse. It’s disappointing, because it doesn’t have to be that way.

@davidwholland
It's because computing resources aren't much of a limiting factor anymore. It's kinda ironic that you didn't need stackoverflow.com to sort out complex problems when you actually had to worry about overflowing the stack!
@gknauss