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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)

#301

Post by Narishma »

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.

Yup. Vim is similar, except its tutorial takes more like 30 minutes.

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

#303

Post by layer8 »

gcanyon wrote: post #258
layer8 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no Windows UI screenshots in the article.

Fair —- but are you claiming either: 1. The DOS screenshots in the article are in any way reflective of a designer’s input 2. That Windows was a visually pleasing design?

The DOS screenshots are reflective of the PC video hardware of the time. Text mode had a fixed 16-color palette [0] at best, the IBM font including graphics characters was preset, while the aspect ratio of the characters wasn’t fixed (the screenshots in the article are 80x25, but I used 80x40 or 80x50, with correspondingly more quadratic text cells). However, the screenshots aren’t quite representative of how things looked on a CRT monitor, however; it looked more vibrant and organic, if that makes sense.

Personally I didn’t find Windows visually pleasing before Windows 95, but much of that can again be attributed to the PC video hardware limitations of the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...

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

#304

Post by tombert »

SoftTalker wrote: post #247
tombert wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. I feel like I do a fair amount of the more advanced features (interactive add and rebase, bisect, worktrees) without any fancy tooling and I don't have a problem much anymore, but admittedly they did confuse me at first.

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

#305

Post by mkovach »

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.

Vim was never a steep learning curve for me; more of a gentle slope. But then again, I cut my teeth on ed, and when I met sed, it felt like a revelation. On DOS, I even used edlin, a kind of ed junior with training wheels and a sadistic sense of "functional."

You have to understand: my first DOS machine was a Tandy 1000, acquired before I had a driver’s license. It was upgraded over the years and not retired until the grunge was well underway and I had already been married and divorced.

MS-DOS’s edit had WordStar keybindings; Ctrl-S to move back, Ctrl-E to move up, and so on. My dad "brought" home a copy of WordStar from work, and oh, the things that trio, WordStar, me, and a dot matrix printer conspired to create.

Borland carried those keybindings into Turbo Pascal, which I learned in college, having finally escaped the Fortran 77 gulag that was my high school’s TRS-80 Model III/IV lab. The investment into the Apple II lab didn't happen until AFTER they gave me my exit papers at a spring awards ceremony.

Why do I still prefer these tools?

Because they’re what I know. They don’t get in my way. We have history, a better and longer history that I have with my first wife. Those keybinds helped me write my first sorting algorithms, my first papers on circuit design, and the cover letters that got me my first jobs. They’re not just efficient. They’re familiar. They’re home.

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

#306

Post by rkagerer »

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! That phenomenon drives me crazy. I used to be able to use a computer at warp speed by staying ahead of its responses with chains of rapid keyboard shortcuts etc. Now it's like I'm trying to sride through molasses.

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

#307

Post by nec4b »

guerrilla wrote: post #135
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has been doing this either professionally (since 1996) or as a hobbyist programming in assembly and a little Basic (1986-1992), I’m always amazed at the feigned Slashdot style “I haven’t owned a Tv in 40 years why do people still watch them”. Are you really saying that you don’t see any utility in modern IDEs? Even back in 1999 I thought Visual Studio was a breath of fresh air let alone R# with all of…

What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal. Another way of putting it is why would I need an IDE other than UNIX (GNU) itself? > But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend gdb does all of that.

>> What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal.

Why do you need a terminal for if you can do all that with flipping switches and looking at LEDs?

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

#308

Post by snovymgodym »

markus_zhang wrote: post #287
snovymgodym wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco still uses AS/400 company-wide for their inventory system I think

Interesting. Looks like it suits them perfectly. I wonder if the AS/400 is running in an emulator or on a real machine.

I doubt it, probably just running on a regular Power ISA rack mount server from IBM. Though I guess technically all IBM i aka AS/400 is running on an emulator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#Technology_Independent_M...

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

#309

Post by mkovach »

chuckadams wrote: post #171
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…

There's a lot from Plan 9 I love, but I couldn't find Acme's mouse-dependent UI acceptable in the least. I can't deal with any UI that requires precise aim when I have to use it hour after hour, and I'd hate to imagine using it if I had an actual disability.

Most days, you’ll find me in sam, regexing my way to bliss like some monastic scribe with a terminal fetish. When I feel the urge to let AI stroke my curiosity or scaffold a long template like magic, I cut, paste, and drop it into a local or remote model like a well-trained familiar.

But I’ve also written larger applications and, frankly, a ridiculous amount of documentation in Acme. That 9P protocol was my backstage pass: every window, every label, was accessible and programmable. I could, for example, hook into a save event and automatically format, lint, and compile ten or fifteen years before most IDEs figured out how to fake that kind of integration.

Sure, the system demands precision. It doesn't coddle. But for me, that was the feature, not the bug. The rigor sharpened my thinking. It taught me to be exact or be silent, forcing me to pause when I usually would not.

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

#310

Post by eikenberry »

pjmlp wrote: post #255
heresie-dabord wrote: post #159

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. 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 er…

As someone that started when only rich people could afford GUIs, I don't understand what is killer app about it. We used text terminals because that is what we could afford, and I gladly only start a terminal window when I have to.

The killer thing about it is that it is a gateway to the shell, all the command line tooling and the best cross-platform UI.
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