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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)

#451

Post by jjav »

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…

>it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruction.

If they just plop you in front of a 3-d printer never having seen one and having no documentation, it'll probably take you a good while to produce something useful with it.

All good tools require training & experience.

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

#452

Post by jjav »

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.

> Maybe it's Stockholm syndrome for me, but I never really understood what was so unusable about the vanilla command line git interface.

I'm as hardcode CLI user as it gets, I've only lived in the CLI since the mid 80s and still firmly there.

git is the absolute worst CLI ever in the history of humanity.

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

#453

Post by imron »

geophile wrote: post #201

Turbo Pascal was completely amazing. I remember resisting it for a long time, because IIRC it implemented non-standard Pascal. But the competitive tools were less powerful and far more expensive, (e.g. the Microsoft tools). And then I tried it, and was completely blown away. I no longer cared about the non-standard stuff. I had a fast intuitive IDE running on my original IBM PC. As for modern IDEs, Intellij has been…

> so I can't comment on VSCode and its predecessors

Vscode is a pale imitation of its predecessors.

Visual c++ was amazing and remains my favorite ide ever.

It was also the spiritual successor of the Borland TUI IDEs because MS stole all of Borland’s top compiler engineers.

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

#454

Post by nly »

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…

Windows maintains both a synchronous and asynchronous key state. The async one gives the result of the state of keys in a polled fashion, and the other the state as applied by messages as you pump the the Win32 message queue (it's in sync with respect to messages you have observed from the message queue)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20041130-00/?p=37...

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

#455

Post by versteegen »

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…

(Edit:) Let me start by thanking you, I love these stories about the glory days of computing generations past! I really must try some of these; obviously there are so many fantastic ideas to take.

Irrelevant aside: I've been using emacs 20 years but I very recently gave up and mapped ctrl-V to paste because I still made the mistake of hitting that too often. (I don't hit ctrl-C accidentally, because to select text I've already switched to emacs for at least a few seconds.)

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

#456

Post by rahen »

skopje wrote: post #184
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…

djgpp + vi for dos in 1991 ftw!

Did you really use vi on DOS in 1991? I don’t remember Elvis being easy to find back then, and I don’t think it was a TSR either, so the compiler couldn’t be spawned in the background like it was with the Borland IDEs.

Almost every C bedroom programmer I knew had a cracked copy of Turbo C / Turbo C++ because they were so modern and convenient. DJGPP was a nightmare in comparison, it filled up the small HDDs of the time, created large executables, and the process of opening edit.com, leaving the editor, running gcc, and then going back to edit.com was tedious.

The few brave souls using DJGPP would usually end up running Slackware from around 1993. This was a step up from bolting an awkward POSIX runtime onto a monotasking system, as DJGPP did on DOS.

DJGPP was a stellar idea, basically the WSL / MinGW of the days, but the limitations of DOS prevented it to shine compared to the Borland IDEs.

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

#457

Post by albertzeyer »

mkl wrote: post #400
albertzeyer wrote: post #332

Ok, this post is mostly about text-based IDEs, but I think the point mostly stands as well for IDEs in general. I'm thinking about Visual Basic or Delphi. I think such a IDE for Python would really be helpful for beginners. Not text-based, but more like Visual Basic. But everything integrated, everything easily discoverable (that's very important!). Maybe also with such a GUI builder as in VB. And a built-in debugger…

> I think such a IDE for Python would really be helpful for beginners. Not text-based, but more like Visual Basic. But everything integrated, everything easily discoverable (that's very important!). Maybe also with such a GUI builder as in VB. And a built-in debugger. That was Boa Constructor, starting in 2000: https://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/ . It seemed good at the time, but never caught on.

Oh, I just checked, there is an active fork: https://github.com/ianBBB/boa-constructor

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

#458

Post by kccqzy »

neutronicus wrote: post #431
kccqzy wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I only recently discovered that Ctrl+Ins and Shift+Ins worked in my Emacs despite me never configuring it; and it even works in the minibuffer. It also worked in a couple of terminal emulators I have tried on Linux. It's really more universal than one might think.

I use Shift+Insert constantly in Spacemacs since I can't use evil-mode "p" in the minibuffer

I think the usual way of doing paste in Spacemacs is yank, C-y.

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

#459

Post by trinix912 »

jjav wrote: post #451
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…

>it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruction. If they just plop you in front of a 3-d printer never having seen one and having no documentation, it'll probably take you a good while to produce something useful with it. All good tools require training & experience.

The difference here is that this person has likely used text editors before and still couldn't figure this one out.

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

#460

Post by trinix912 »

prmoustache wrote: post #360
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…

vi is documented Problem is most people start it the first time by providing a text file instead of firing it on its own and be greeted by the tutorial. I guess that is because they are blindly following another tutorial instead of trying to understand what they are doing. My opinion is that "self documentation", "Getting started" pages and "tutorials" is a disease. People would actually get up to speed quicker by re…

VI or VIM? VI has no welcome screen. It drops you straight into a blank screen of '~' from where you just have to know to enter the insert mode, which is also not indicated anywhere unlike in VIM.
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