GUI builders considered harmful

[Bruce Stephens]

Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:

[...]

> The first, and most obvious, thing that GUI builders do is force the
> developer to specify an exact position - if not size - for the
> graphical elements of the UI.

They do?  I don't remember them doing that.  I just downloaded SpecTcl
(a oldish example) just to check, and that doesn't.  I presume more
recent ones work no less well?

I seem to remember that the GUI builder in Visual Studio didn't seem
to be particularly sane (I couldn't seem to work out how to get a
dialog to resize appropriately to accommodate different font sizes,
for example), but I assumed that was just me failing to understand
something.

[...]