IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

I'm interested in how these old IDEs were used during the transition from assembly to high level languages. It seems especially topical given the LLM integration into today's IDEs.

Back then was it common to have a split or interleaved view of high level and assembly at the same time?

I'm aware that you could do something like the following, but did IDEs help visualize in a unified UI?:

    $ cc -S program.c
    $ cat program.s    # look at the assembly
    $ vi program.c     # edit the C code

A quick search shows that Borland Turbo C (1987) had in-line assembly:

    myfunc ()
    {
        int i;
        int x;
        if (i > 0)
            asm mov x,4
        else
            i = 7;
    }

From the 1987 Borland Turbo C User's Guide [0] "This construct is a valid C if statement. Note that no semicolon was needed after the mov x, 4 instruction. asm statements are the only statements in C which depend upon the occurrence of a newline. OK, so this is not in keeping with the rest of the C language, but this is the convention adopted by several UNIX-based compilers."

[0]: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/borland/tur...

I remember using Borland Turbo for C/C++ classes in my school and college days. In fact, it is still being used in most of the colleges in India even now. What nostalgia!

(Article is from 2023, so the title should be updated to say "32 years ago", or something)

The biggest loss in TUIs is the latest wave of asynchronous frameworks, which bring the joy of dropped keypresses to the terminal.

In any TUI released before the year 2000, if you press a key when the system wasn't ready, the key would just wait until the system was ready. Many TUIs today still do this, but increasingly frequently (with the modern "web-inspired" TUI frameworks), the system will be ready to take your keypress, and discard it because the async dialog box hasn't registered its event listener yet.

Other than that antipattern, TUIs are doing great these days. As for terminal IDEs, Neovim has never been more featureful, with LSPs and other plugins giving all the features this article discusses. I guess it isn't a mouse-driven TUI, so the author wouldn't be interested, but still.

> Transient UIs [...] could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer.

For people who can look at a list of key bindings once and have them memorized, maybe. Turns out most people are not like that, and appreciate an interface that accounts for that.

You also completely ignore that the menus are used to set arguments to be used by the command subsequently invoked, and that the enabled/disabled arguments and their values can be remembered for future invocations.

> The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch

Not true. (Try it.) This was true for very early versions; it hasn't been true for years.

> or switching around buffers

Since you earlier said that transient menus could be replaced with regular prefix keys, it seems appropriate to point out that transient menus share this "defect" with regular prefix keys, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/17#issuecomment-46.... (Except that in the case of transient you actually can enable such buffer switching, it's just strongly discouraged because you are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do that, but if you really want to you can, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/114#issuecomment-8....

> has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.

I usually do not respond to posts like this (anymore), but sometimes the urge is just too strong.

I have grown increasingly irritated by your behavior over the last few weeks. Your suggestion to add my cond-let* to Emacs had a list of things "you are doing wrong" attached. You followed that up on Mastodon with (paraphrasing) "I'm gonna stop using Magit because it's got a sick new dependency". Not satisfied with throwing out my unconventional syntax suggestion, you are now actively working on making cond-let* as bad as possible. And now you are recycling some old misconceptions about Transient, which can at best be described as half-truths.

For reference, I did use Magit for my short stint with Emacs (and then Spacemacs/Doom Emacs). I've always been more into Vim. I tried the Atom editor several years ago with lots of Vim emulation and quite a bit of customization - one of those being a Magit clone.

I moved to NeoVim many years ago and have been using NeoGit (a supposed Magit clone) the entire time. It's good but I'm missing the "mind blowing" part. I'd love to learn more though! What features are you using that you consider amazing?