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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)

#241

Post by 3x35r22m4u »

Lapel2742 wrote: post #53

> “In my house”, we used something called SideKick Plus (1984), which wasn’t really a code editor: it was more of a Personal Information Management (PIM) system with a built-in notepad. Finally! Someone who still remembers the best software ever written. I looooved Sidekick and we used it throughout our small company. It's so long ago. I remember only parts of it now but it was such a useful tool.

SideKick had the ability to take "screenshots" of the text shown in other applications. Being a TSR was cool, but stealing text from another program interface was mind blowing!

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

#242

Post by Twirrim »

markus_zhang wrote: post #169
cameldrv wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Back in the DOS days, and even before, when people used actual terminals, there was a keystroke buffer. You'd see people who really knew the interface fly through tasks being multiple keystrokes ahead of the UI. Stuff would just flash onto the screen and disappear as it processed the input that was already in its buffer. It should be possible to implement this with modern frameworks, but it requires thought.

Yeah. I used to work as a phone surveyor, the one you hate. Our software is a terminal connected to a mainframe. I got used to it after a few weeks and was very productive. Costco Canada vision shops still use a terminal connected to an AS/400 machine as I snooped around last month.

In the late 90s I was required to slowly replace dumb terminals with PCs. One of the older ladies taking phone orders was most put out by this, understandably. She was lightning fast on that terminal. She'd never used a PC (I hit on the idea of using solitaire to learn to use a mouse, which worked amazingly well), and was never able to get to the same speed with one as she'd done on her dumb terminal. It's hard to beat the performance of dedicated devices.

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

#243

Post by pkal »

SoftTalker wrote: post #190
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm pretty sure that if you have an unmodified install and no .emacs that is configured otherwise, when you start emacs you are prompted with a help screen that includes instructions on using the built-in tutorial. If you do that, you'll learn the basics in about 10-15 minutes. If you skip that, yeah it's pretty different from most other software conventions.

And if you don't have anything configured, graphical Emacs will have a tool bar with a button to save and a menu bar that also gives the binding for the command.

GUI is different because there is no tool bar, but in Emacs 31 `xterm-mouse-mode' will be enabled by default so you can use the menu bar like a TUI.

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

#245

Post by robenkleene »

disqard wrote: post #228
robenkleene wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes. What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them? I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.

Sci-fi author Robert Sawyer (who has won Hugo and Nebula awards) is a big fan of Wordstar -- he uses it to write his books. I highly recommend reading this: https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm

This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.

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

#246

Post by johnebgd »

mxkopy wrote: post #235
EbEsacAig wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment. I think you are wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory Being extremely good at something increases the gap between said something and everything else. That doesn't mean being extremely good at the first thing is "over-specialization to detriment". If someone is equally mediocre at every…

What if the IDE is a LeapFrog 2-in-1 Educational Laptop

If you make usable products that solve problems for others from that then it’s a great IDE…

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

#247

Post by SoftTalker »

tombert wrote: post #213
SoftTalker wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mind-blowing because it makes git actually usable.

Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome for me, but I never really understood what was so unusable about the vanilla command line git interface. If you want to do some really advanced stuff, sure it's a little arcane, but the vast majority of stuff that people use in git is easy enough. Branching and committing and merging never seemed that hard to me.

Wnen I do anything more than commit/push/pull at the command line I will quickly get myself so confused that I end up deleting the directory and cloning it again. That doesn't happen to me (much) with magit.

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

#248

Post by mikewarot »

I was expecting to see the most productive IDEs of all time, Visual Basic 6 and/or Borland Delphi, but we're just ahead of those in this article.

While it was truly amazing that Borland managed to stuff a full text editor into a TSR under MS-DOS, and every new version of Turbo Pascal was faster and had more features, it all culminated somewhere around Delphi for me, and Visual Basic 6 for almost everyone else.

Then the world ended... Anders Hejlsberg was lost to Microsoft, and everyone went collectively crazy in at least two orthogonal ways.

First there was the obsession with C++ as "higher level" than Pascal and the view that it was for "adults", which was delusional. C++ generated a f*ckton more boilerplate and was brittle for the same functionality, at least when generating a GUI program.

Then there was Microsoft's obsession with .NET, which they never recovered from. They crammed all the bloat of an interpreter into everything imaginable, even the operating system. You were always having to get the latest .NET libraries to make things work. They destroyed Visual Basic over this, and it never recovered.

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

#249

Post by whartung »

I think these modern TUIs are a testament to the general failure of modern GUIs.

It's not like they're particularly easier to write these.

But since there's no remote GUI option, much less a portable remote GUI option, particularly one that's not just a video of an entire desktop, we're stuck with these.

WHo wants to fire up an entire desktop to get open a simple utility app?

Obviously the Web satisfies much of the demand for this, but clearly not all.

Remote X is, essentially, dead. It's obviously "really hard", since "no one does that any more". Or, folks just don't miss having rootless windows peering into their remote server enclaves.

It's just too bad, full circle, here we are again. "Progress."

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