> Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development.
> All layout was pixel based.
I'd say that was a very reasonable trade-off at the time, when most screens were somewhere between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolutions at 72 DPI. This simplified UI design sufficiently enough that VB/Delphi provided an optimal solution that, yes in hindsight, would most accurately be described as a "local maxima" for the environment and the time.
> Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code
I remember there were ActiveX controls one could drop onto their form that would attempt to derive the layout based on initial positioning of controls, i.e. that a lower row of buttons should be anchored to the bottom of the window, while textboxes are took up a larger area would automagically resize with the window.
A lot of products these days are intentionally poorly designed with no longevity. "Planned obsolescence" is the term. Part of moving everything to as-a-service model :)
> Many compiler optimizations (such as stack frame elimination) are disabled in the checked build. This makes it easier to understand disassembled machine instructions, and therefore it is easier to trace the cause of problems in system software.
> All layout was pixel based.
I'd say that was a very reasonable trade-off at the time, when most screens were somewhere between 640x480 and 1024x768 resolutions at 72 DPI. This simplified UI design sufficiently enough that VB/Delphi provided an optimal solution that, yes in hindsight, would most accurately be described as a "local maxima" for the environment and the time.
> Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code
I remember there were ActiveX controls one could drop onto their form that would attempt to derive the layout based on initial positioning of controls, i.e. that a lower row of buttons should be anchored to the bottom of the window, while textboxes are took up a larger area would automagically resize with the window.