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IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

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Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#111

Post by Dwedit »

sph wrote: post #2

Now that CLI tools are in fashion again... has nobody thought to recreate a modern version of Turbo C++/Pascal? I know there's Emacs and vim, but they're far too programmable and bloated compared to the elegance of TC++, which did one job, and one job only, very well. Also, despite being an Emacs power user at this point, it's never going to be as ergonomic and well thought out with its arcane chords, while TC++ conv…

DOS programs ran in Text Mode, and directly interacted with the keyboard hardware.

Linux Terminal programs are running in an emulated terminal, and are bound by keyboard input restrictions that DOS programs did not have.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#113

Post by 4b11b4 »

Recent install of Emacs 30 and Doom 3.0 via https://github.com/jimeh/emacs-builds (MacOS) is feeling very nice.

Emacs actually is friendly! apropos and all of the describe commands make it /discoverable/.

Literate configs and tangling?! I finally feel the end game.

Yes, you probably should read a book at the same time on the side to give you a higher perspective on fundamentals. Sure, some other tools are simpler to get started.

If I could drop everything I'd make a simple emacs config for kids with like a turtles mode and maybe a sound sequencer, then teach them functional programming first. Hah

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#115

Post by constantcrying »

jeroenhd wrote: post #49
constantcrying wrote: post #14

The arguments for using TUI IDEs are just very poor. Developers should not be relying on something as loaded with legacy bloat like the terminal, to do development. Zed has remote editing support and is open source. Resource consumption is a bizarre proposition, considering what abstractions the terminal has to be forced into to behave something like a normal window. Really, TUIs are not very good. I get it, I use th…

One thing that's nearly impossible to replicate on modern systems is the extremely tight feedback loop these TUIs had. Keyboard latency was near non-existent while basic calculators these days will happily take a hundred milliseconds to process a key press. We don't need to go back to the 66MHz era, but it's embarrassing that programs running on a dozen computer cores all executing at several gigahertz feel less resp…

>One thing that's nearly impossible to replicate on modern systems is the extremely tight feedback loop these TUIs

Why? Yes, VSCode is slow. But Zed and many neovim GUIs are extremely responsive. Why would achieving that even be impossible or even that hard? You "just" need software which is fast enough to render the correct output the frame after the input. In an age where gaming is already extremely latency sensitive, why would having a text editor with similar latency performance be so hard?

Do you have any actual evidence that zed or neovide are suffering from latency problems? And why would putting a terminal in the middle help in any way in reducing that latency?

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#116

Post by tpm »

guerrilla wrote: post #31

I'm going to get punished for saying this, but I don't really see the point of IDEs when you have things like vim, Makefiles and bash. It just seems like more things to go wrong. I used Eclipse while I was doing Java development for a while and it had some conveniences but for the most part I just see it as one more thing that can go wrong and get in my way. Anyway, does anyone remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? I see…

I can't really imagine navigating huge Java codebases with vim or bash. OTOH I used vim to work with Perl (that was not a small codebase either but had a very different structure).

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#118

Post by brucehoult »

dimitar wrote: post #23

I think Emacs still does all of this; the argument the author makes is that it is "arcane", it just uses conventions he is not used to. It is however fully self-documented and interactive. For me the best textual interface I've ever used remains Magit in Emacs: https://magit.vc/ I wish more of Emacs was like it. I actually use emacs as my git clients even when I'm using a different IDE for whatever reason.

The thing is that emacs predates Apple developing cmd-z/x/c/v and Microsoft copying Apple in Windows. Before that, the most commonly copied keystrokes in programmer's editors were the freaking Wordstar ones e.g. in all the Borland products.

Also OP apparently has no knowledge of the far better IDEs we had 30-40 years ago including but not limited to:

- Apple MPW, 1986. GUI editor where every window is (potentially) a Unix-like shell, running commands if you hit Enter (or cmd-Return) instead of Return. Also the shell scripting has commands for manipulating windows, running editing actions inside them etc. Kind of like elisp but with shell syntax. There's an integrated source code management system called Projector. If you type a command name, with or without arguments and switches, and then hit option-Return then it pops up a "Commando" window with a GUI with checkboxes and menus etc for all options for that command, with anything you'd already typed already filled out. It was easy to set up Commando for your own programs too.

- Apple Dylan, 1992-1995. Incredible Lisp/Smalltalk-like IDE for Apple's Dylan language

- THINK Pascal and C, 1986. The Pascal version was orginaly an interpreter, I think written for Apple, but then became a lightning-fast compiler, similar to Borland on CP/M and MS-DOS but better (and GUI). The C IDE later became a Symantec product.

- Metrowerks Codewarrior, 1993. Ex THINK/Symantec people starting a Mac IDE from scratch, incorporating first Metrowerks' M68000 compilers for the Amiga, then a new PowerPC back end. Great IDE, great compilers -- the first anywhere to compile Stepanov's STL with zero overhead -- and with a groundbreaking application framework called PowerPlant that heavily leaned on new C++ features. It was THE PowerPC development environment, especially after Symantec's buggy PoS version 6.

- Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp (later dropped the "Allegro"), 1987. A great Mac IDE. A great Lisp compiler and environment. Combined in one place. It was expensive but allowed amazing productivity in custom native Mac application development, far ahead of the Pascal / C / C++ environments. Absolutely perfect for consultants.

Really, it is absolutely incredible how slick and sophisticated a lot of these were, developed on 8 MHz to 33 or 40 MHz M68000s with from 2-4 MB RAM up to maybe 16-32 MB. (A lot of the Mac II line (and SE/30) theoretically supported 128 MB RAM, but no one could afford that much even once big enough SIMs were were available.)

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#119

Post by layer8 »

skydhash wrote: post #109
layer8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To navigate a Turbo-Vision-style IDE and explore its functionality, you basically only need to know how the Alt and Tab keys work (okay, and Return and Esc and arrow keys), as alluded to in TFA. Emacs doesn’t quite have that base level of operating uniformity I think.

The base input of emacs is ‘M-x’. From there, any command is accessible. And you have ‘M-:’ for evaluating any bit of elisp code. There’s a few UI concepts to learn (frame, window, buffers, point, mark, region,…), but that would fit in a single sheet of paper.

The keys I enumerated are sufficient to discover and execute all available operations in that style of TUI. You don’t have to type commands or command-specific keyboard shortcuts, like you have to in Emacs. It’s analogous to how in a traditional GUI you can discover and execute everything just using the mouse.

Like in the GUI analogy, you can then choose to remember and use the displayed keyboard shortcuts for frequently used operations, but you don’t have to.

Re: IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

#120

Post by exe34 »

bombcar wrote: post #73
mkovach wrote: post #32

Ah, Borland’s IDE! An absolute delight. I’ve yet to find anything modern that matches it. Sure, nostalgia turns everything syrupy, but I actively hunt for excuses to use Free Pascal just to fire up that interface. Okay, fine—I like Pascal too. You caught me. I also use Sam and Acme from Plan 9 (technically from the excellent plan9port), but let’s be honest: those aren’t IDEs. They’re editors. Tools that let me think…

One thing about the "professional" DOS software (and you can see it in things like Emacs - eight modes and constantly shifting) was you were basically expected to live in it - it had the full attention of the computer and the user. You were also expected to learn it; which meant you became "one with the machine" in a way similar to an organ player. I remember watching Fry's Electronics employees fly through their TUI…

Even normal windows applications used to be like this (outside of crashing). I could alt-tab, type stuff and click where I know a button would show before I even saw the application window. It never missed a key stroke or type into the wrong window. Nowadays you load a webpage and start typing, and half you text appears and then the other half just never shows up.
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