Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

blogsystem5.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 607 posts

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

#291

Post by ksherlock »

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.

That's true (you can see it yourself with emacs -nw -q) and the picture is shown in the article. With a completely useless menubar.

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

#292

Post by do_not_redeem »

general1465 wrote: post #280
do_not_redeem wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But since there's no remote GUI option ssh -X and waypipe both work perfectly fine. And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on an OS other than Linux, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done.

> And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on a non-linux OS, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done. If you can make them working. Sorry you can't connect if user is logged on this computer. Whoops RDP session is active, so I will show you this black screen after typing your username and password until user disconnects (Why not kick out the user?). VNC is even bigger pain when you need to boo…

> I will show you this black screen

Right, that's why I said RDP isn't pretty if you aren't on Linux. Windows insists on creating a separate desktop for each session. IIRC it has something to do with licensing, they don't like simultaneous users using one Windows license.

> While on Windows you can just install TightVNC and it works.

If you're resorting to installing third-party apps, you can install TightVNC on Linux too, and it just works. Though I found krfb performs better on my network, ymmv.

> And RDP also assumes that you are running X11 and not Wayland.

RDP is just a protocol that describes the bytes going over the network. Why would it care about your display server? There are VNC and RDP servers for both X11 and Wayland. Just install one that's supported by your system.

Though if you're on linux, you don't have to deal with the VNC/RDP jank at all. Just use ssh -X or waypipe and it's way snappier.

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

#294

Post by Narishma »

robenkleene wrote: post #245
disqard wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used all three and I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I mostly use vi but have no problem switching to the other two schemes when needed. But maybe that's just me not having strong preferences. I know some people who have trouble switching from Chrome to Firefox and those are practically identical.

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

#295

Post by Narishma »

brucehoult wrote: post #118
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…

All your example are in the Apple ecosystem. Depending on where the author is from, it may not be that surprising that they wouldn't know about them. In my corner of the wolrd, Apple was basically non-existent until the iPod and iPhone.

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

#296

Post by misnome »

cameldrv wrote: post #162
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…

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.

Fun story: When I worked at blockbuster I had my computer access revoked and summoned to explain because a colleague told management I was “hacking” when they saw me doing this on the computer system.

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

#297

Post by ninalanyon »

robenkleene wrote: post #178
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…

> 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.

They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger.

You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.

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

#298

Post by shevy-java »

I honestly don't understand why we lose IDEs and editors.

I understand that software requires people maintaining it, but my point is more that I still don't understand the why.

We have some functionality, a lot of which could be re-used in editors and IDEs. But people rarely share stuff. They like to re-implement things. Again and again and again. This is not logical to me.

I'd like to have one editor that does EVERYTHING, but in a modular way so people decide what that editor can do. People could then just maintain one cohesive, feature-rich code base rather than each one duplicating what is already available in another IDE/editor.

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

#299

Post by roryirvine »

a3w wrote: post #142
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…

Rough quote: "in 1984 we had at my house", so even 41 years seems to be in the scope. I was expecting - early projects that ended in Visual Studio 1.0 or NetBeans soon after, (2 to 9 years too early for them) not - "vim (1991) was not out yet" (not-a-quote, but my feeiling upon looking at ncurses instead of floating windows)

Yeah, by 1995, Visual Basic / C++, Delphi / Borland C++, and Symantec C++ were all-conquering.

A few years before, it was very different - VisualAge and Rational Application Developer were the big names in the early 90s in "professional" IDEs. Interface Builder for university spin-outs or funky startups (and SunWorks / Forte Studio for the less-funky ones). CodeWarrior on the Mac (perhaps with THINK! hanging on too). I think Softbench was popular for scientific software, but I never actually saw it myself.

And then just a few years later, the rise of Java turned things upside down again and we got Jbuilder, Visual Cafe, & NetBeans as the beginning of yet another new wave. The Visual Studio suite really began to take off around then, too.

In short, the 90s were a time of huge change and the author seems to have missed most of it!

Post reply on HN