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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)

#321
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Granted, I never used Kylix, but it seems that it had all sorts of problems when it was first released. I don't remember, was Kylix available for Mac?

As far as I recall VCL was ported, but the IDE itself was running WINE (as it was written back then) and it was not very stable.

I just googled and Wikipedia seems to confirm my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix#Features

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

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nope, we still have an IBM i deployment kicking around at $DAYJOB, it's running natively on POWER hardware. Way back in the days of the original OS/400 running on AS/400 hardware, IBM had the foresight to have applications compile to MI (Machine Interface) code; which is a bytecode format closer to something like LLVM IR instead of something like JVM or CLR bytecode. When a PGM object is copied or created on an IBM i system, TIMI (Technology Independent Machine Interface) takes the MI code and translates it to a native executable for the underlying platform.

We probably still have a couple of PGM objects kicking around on our modern POWER hardware that were originally compiled on an old AS/400 system, but they run as native 64-bit POWER code like everything else on the machine.

The IBM midrange line gets a lot of undue disgust these days, it's not sexy by any means, sure, but just like anything running on modern day Z/OS you know that anything you write for it is going to continue to run decades down the line. Well, as long as you limit the amount of stuff you have running on 'modern' languages; because Java, Node, Python, Ruby, etc. are all going to need upgrades while anything written in 'native' languages (RPG, COBOL, C/C++, CL) compiles right down to MI and will keep working forever without changes.

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

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of opinions in the thread without any substance to back it up. If you don’t like TUIs and terminals, that’s ok. But if you actually want to argue against them, let’s hear a substantive argument. What specifically is so bad about the TUI?

They are built on ancient technology and need an enormous array of hacks to emulate basic features, which are trivial to do in any modern GUI. User experience is inconsistent with features varying wildly between terminals, creating a frustrating user experience. It is also making customization difficult. E.g. in a TUI IDE you can not have font settings. Short cuts are also terminal dependent, an IDE can only use thos…

As someone already mentioned before, I don't think you are talking about the same terminal as others are.

>> need an enormous array of hacks to emulate basic features

What are those hacks. As far as I can remember, TUIs ran faster on ancient hardware then anything else on today's modern computers.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Thanks for sharing! (And to be clear, that's totally a great reason!) I wasn't familiar with these bindings and was curious to hear more about them, both the history and the subjective preference for them are both interesting to me.

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

#326

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.

As far as I know, there are no AS/400 emulators.

It's still updated by IBM and runs on POWER. It's just called "i" now.

I believe the naming went something like AS/400->iSeries->System i->System i5->i

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah the entire emacs tutorial might take a long time. I don't think I ever went through it to "the end" but learning cursor movement, opening and saving files, etc. is right up front.

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

#328
post #254
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I tell AI exactly what and very often how to write the code to avoid sub-optimal solutions AI so keen to propose if not properly directed. As for autocompletion, not sure about every tool but CLion and other IDEs I have from JetBrains are genius. Yes they can autocomplete multiple lines of code with a single keystrokes and no I do not really want to write it myself as it mostly boilerplate code I've written m…

How can you recognize optimal / suboptimal solutions if you need to use AI in the first place? As for boilerplate, I thought there were ways to automate this without AI, but I guess that makes sense to me. Not trying to sound accusatory, just jarred by the AI hype generally

>"How can you recognize optimal / suboptimal solutions"

Maybe because I have 40+ years of programming under my belt starting with machine codes and every type of software one can imagine.

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

#329

TUIs sucked and they still suck. Programmers are trying to bring them back bc nostalgia I guess? I floated the idea of TUIs to our data engineering team and got very negative responses. (My nostalgia for undergrad turbo pascal TUI I guess lol)

>> TUIs sucked

Compared to what available at that time?

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