Most of the stuff there would be just... normal now. It's quite unusual for SPAs to have a decent consistent UX. And the slowness would never have been tolerated back in the day.
I think that's mostly it. Design has a much larger role, and form-oriented development with common controls doesn't cut it. You couldn't imagine an app like Facebook in a forms-style UI, it's almost ludicrous to imagine.
Looked at retrospectively, forms were just one step above green screen applications on a terminal, transplanting one set of structural idioms to another, like for like.
If forms are essentially terminal apps, is FB much different from a teletype news service, with hyper-filtered content and an infinite set of data sources?
I see massive sea change in connectivity and immersiveness of today, but not really in what we're trying to achieve.
or MS Access, or Hypercard - we've had productivity boosters, just never anything remotely close to eliminating the inherently hard act of "building software".
The GUI was doing local work, but the database could be remote. Delphi's name is even a pun on Oracle.
I'm not saying they were halcyon days. I'm saying that the effort to do things is not necessarily less these days, in part because we have different expectations (not necessarily requirements) today.
In 2000 using VB, you can build a GUI, make a working Windows application using a minimum amount of code. Also the documentation (msdn) and the community was really nice.
20 years on MS Access has been one of the quickest lowest code way to build a functional application. What a mess everything is these days in comparison.
If you wanted to build a data entry / collection app with basic validation, querying, filtering etc. you could easily do that with no code in 2000-era Delphi.
