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Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#31

Post by T-A »

Delphi 3.0 (it went downhill after that). You could slap together a GUI quickly in the form editor, wire it up to your code (i.e. fill out the auto-generated event handlers) and compile in seconds (on a 1990s PC!).

There was a large selection of add-on GUI widgets and non-visual components, free and commercial, you could make your own and you could even modify the core Visual Component Library (the source was included).

If you needed to talk to other applications via COM, or directly to the OS, or load C/C++ libraries, it was easy. And you could do all that in one integrated IDE, instead of having to learn and orchestrate a jumbled mess of different tools.

It also didn't hurt that by targeting Windows only back then, you had something like 90% of the potential market covered.

It was bliss while it lasted.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#32

Post by coldcode »

Turbo Pascal in 1983-84. The first IDE is ever saw, compiler, linker, editor and debugger ran in memory on a PC/XT with 640K RAM. I still have the impression today that it could build faster than I could think, but of course the expectation of software was much less than today.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#33

Post by vanous »

thdxr wrote: post #17

Arch Linux, i3, vscode with vim bindings, Firefox with Vimium. Optimized for not using your mouse. It's not so much about literally saving you time since typing is only small portion of your day, but being able to express yourself with less effort goes a long way in keeping you from feeling mentally drained

Is there a simple way in vscode to pass selection of text to external tool like sort or python script, like vim can do? I tried but didn't find anything simple...

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#34

Post by yeswecatan »

aportnoy wrote: post #27

tmux + NeoVim for Python development. Switched from regular Vim after discovered NeoVim has much better Python support and a smarter terminal.

Can you expand on this a bit? I've been writing Python in vim using some plugins-- mainly jedi-vim, YouCompleteMe, ctrlp, and SimpylFold. What does NeoVim do better?

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#39

Post by stuartd »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #18

Visual Studio 6, when you could drag and drop your UI, double click elements to code what they do, and all of the generated code was human readable. I'm not sure we'll ever get a development environment designed to put together software that quickly again with all of our modern expectations for design, mobile friendliness, etc.

Well, you can still do that in Visual Studio 2017 with Windows Forms. Remember when when they tried to do the same with Web Forms? What a disaster. I suspect this may have been the reason they moved to declarative UI like WPF but I personally don't buy that approach. Then again, I work on conversational interfaces now where there literally is no UI at all except a textbox and a send button..
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