IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by self_awareness » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

nhatcher wrote: post #146

Worth mentioning a version of ms Edit is now opensource. Not only that, it is extraordinary code to learn from: [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/edit [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529

I wouldn't learn from it, since it uses unsafe code even for basic stuff, like hash calculation.

It's also a complete reimplementation, it shares only the name with original edit.com.

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

#152

Post by fred_is_fred » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:25 PM UTC

I wrote my first program using Borland Turbo Pascal probably around 1993 at my high school. I think those systems ran DOS 3.0 or maybe 5.0? It was all trivial stuff but I found it to be very helpful to debug issues.

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

#153

Post by self_awareness » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

Onavo wrote: post #13

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly because of static linking. C and C++ don't put every library they need in the binary by default. The advantage is that a pure Go or Rust binary just works (most of the time) when copied from one machine to another, you don't have to care about installing other libraries.

Go especially, on some platforms they go straight to syscalls and bypass libc entirely. They even bring their own network stack. It's the maximalist plan 9 philosophy in action.

I don't really like Go as a language, but this decision to skip libc and go directly with syscalls is genius. I wish Rust could do the same. More languages should skip libc. Glibc is the main reason Linux software is binary non-portable between distros (of course not the only reason, but most of the problems come from glibc).

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

#154

Post by ttul » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC

My view of the PC dev era was through the lens of a kid growing up in the 1980s with a dad who programmed for a living. My dad was a big fan of the Borland IDEs starting with Turbo Pascal and then moving on to the world of C and C++ by the late-1980s. As a kid, my friend and I spent hundreds of hours in Quick Basic’s TUI - always trying to remake Super Mario Bros but never coming close to succeeding.

These early IDEs were fantastic at their job and worked so well given the constraints of the DOS environment of the time. It’s a shame that Borland the company eventually faded to black in 2015, but that’s how these things go. I wonder where all the geniuses behind the Borland IDEs ended up.

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

#155

Post by krs_ » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #139

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.

> It is however fully self-documented and interactive. Unfortunately not true. I've fired up emacs once or twice, and couldn't even figure out how to save a document because it didn't show me how to do that. It might be more documented than vi (but that bar is *on the floor, vi has one of the most discovery-hostile user interfaces ever made), but it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruc…

That's a fair criticism, although once you learn how to access the documentation and where to look for/expext it I find that most things, including add-on packages and whatnot, can be learned from within Emacs itself just fine. But it does take some knowledge to get to that point in the first place for sure.

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

#156

Post by nhatcher » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

self_awareness wrote: post #151

nhatcher wrote: post #146

Worth mentioning a version of ms Edit is now opensource. Not only that, it is extraordinary code to learn from: [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/edit [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031529

I wouldn't learn from it, since it uses unsafe code even for basic stuff, like hash calculation. It's also a complete reimplementation, it shares only the name with original edit.com.

Well, you wouldn't learn as is let's learn Rust from it. But I think it has many interesting bits not found in most open source projects out there. and true that, there is a lot of unsafe code, uses nightly builds, its own allocator, crazy stuff. I did learn a lot from it :)

And yeah, it is a reimplemantion. But it is a TUI and very minimal. Keepining it minimal, with no dependendecies and software bloat seems to be one of the guidelines. So very much something adding to the article at case.

But yeah, you are right on both counts.

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

#157

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

maccard wrote: post #16

api wrote: post #5

Speaking of bloat: why are binaries from Rust or (much worse) Go so damn huge? This is in release mode with debug off. It’s weird because memory use for the same sorts of programs is not much worse than other languages. In Rust memory use seems comparable to C++. In Go there’s a bit more overhead but it’s still smaller than the binary. So all this is not being loaded. I get the sense devs just don’t put a lot of effo…

Rust doesn’t strip debug info by default.

[deleted]

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

#158

Post by spwa4 » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

dardeaup wrote: post #95

andsoitis wrote: post #83

Delphi - fantastic, modern RAD IDE. Borland heritage. Can build native apps for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

Delphi is still very impressive. However, they missed out on a much greater opportunity. Part of Delphi's crown jewels is VCL which can only be used on Windows. If you use Delphi for an OS other than Windows you have to use FireMonkey/FMX. Lazarus has LCL which is VERY similar to VCL, but LCL on Lazarus is not limited to Windows. One can write a LCL application and it works the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If D…

VCL was ported to linux in the "Kylix" product, for both Pascal and C++. It was non-free and didn't see any uptake really.

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

#159

Post by heresie-dabord » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

CGamesPlay wrote: post #125

(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 frequen…

When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment. And possibly to the detriment of the code itself.

> As for terminal IDEs

The GNU/Linux terminal is the killer app. Multiple terminals in a tiling window manager is peak productivity for me. (Browser in a separate virtual workspace.)

And modern scaling for a big display is unbeatable for developer ergonomics.

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

#160

Post by chuckadams » Sat, Oct 18, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

I learned the C language from K&, and the C API by right-clicking on all the things in Turbo C on a 286. Learned a fair bit of lisp from emacs using C-h f. I do love the navigation capabilities modern IDEs have, but unless a library's author has gone off the deep end writing doc comments, they don't have the same discoverability.