I am struggling with the GUI designer factor. Most of my career has been spent working on WinForms and WPF GUIs and a stack of different things under them. Visual designers are fantastic for tweaking layout, but lately the question I&#x27;m asking is whether it&#x27;s really worth being forced into a particular way of retaining state in the UI and a particular edit&#x2F;compile&#x2F;test workflow.<p>When I step back and look at the broader life cycle of projects, very little time is spent in the visual designer. Is that because visual designers are <i>just that powerful</i> or does it speak more to the relative weight of other development factors dominating projects, at least the ones I work on, and admit a possibility that the designer may be worth giving up in trade for other gains in other areas like interactivity (e.g. F# REPL) or a different conceptual model (e.g. React-style functional components)?<p>I surely wouldn&#x27;t want to write big WinForms&#x2F;WPF GUIs in normal imperative style:<p><pre><code>  var f = new Form();
  var p = new Panel();
  var b = new Button();
  b.Text = &quot;Go&quot;;
  b.Click += ...
  p.Add(b);
  f.Controls.Add(p);
</code></pre>
But the way React&#x2F;Om and Elm are integrating GUI construction into the flow of the program is looking awfully compelling.<p>I&#x27;m interested in hearing more perspectives on the tradeoffs between having visual designers and constructing the GUI in code, assuming an acceptably powerful syntax or model for constructing it.