Live data from Hacker News

IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

blogsystem5.substack.com

51–60 of 607 posts

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

#51
post #22

Crimson Editor.

It's emerald editor now I think - https://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/. I used to use this because it had integrated ftp and the place I was working wouldn't allow shares so edit in crimson editor and save as ftp. Its a nice editor.

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

#52
One I used to love back in the 80s/90s was GFA Basic on the Atari ST. In a similar category of TUI (mostly, it did have mouse control and menu bars, but you didn't have to reach for them) with great auto-indentation and code folding (features not common in mainstream editors at the time) and instant compilation and error checking.

It took many decades for me to get that kind of flow back for mainstream programming languages on modern computers. And modern IDEs still have higher latency than they should.

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

#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.

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

#54
post #2

Now that CLI tools are in fashion again... has nobody thought to recreate a modern version of Turbo C++/Pascal? I know there's Emacs and vim, but they're far too programmable and bloated compared to the elegance of TC++, which did one job, and one job only, very well. Also, despite being an Emacs power user at this point, it's never going to be as ergonomic and well thought out with its arcane chords, while TC++ conv…

Have you seen tvision[0] and turbo[1]? [0] https://github.com/magiblot/tvision [1] https://github.com/magiblot/turbo

There is also Free Vision which is part of Free Pascal. I used it sometime ago when i wanted to write a TUI viewer[0] for info files[1], though i never finished it (should pick it up at some point since it is mostly done).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Qvkt3W0.png

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_nod...

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

#56

The arguments for using TUI IDEs are just very poor. Developers should not be relying on something as loaded with legacy bloat like the terminal, to do development. Zed has remote editing support and is open source. Resource consumption is a bizarre proposition, considering what abstractions the terminal has to be forced into to behave something like a normal window. Really, TUIs are not very good. I get it, I use th…

One thing that's nearly impossible to replicate on modern systems is the extremely tight feedback loop these TUIs had. Keyboard latency was near non-existent while basic calculators these days will happily take a hundred milliseconds to process a key press. We don't need to go back to the 66MHz era, but it's embarrassing that programs running on a dozen computer cores all executing at several gigahertz feel less resp…

AFAIK Borland C++ (even on Windows) used to read the source from whatever editor buffers you had already in the IDE and since the compiler was part of the IDE, it cached various states in memory, which is why it was so fast (for a C/C++ compiler anyway - Delphi was much faster) even on slow hardware. Meanwhile Visual C++ (and modern IDEs) had you autosave the file to disk so the compiler, that was launched as a separate program (often for each file), could read it (and rebuild its internal state from scratch for every single file).

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

#58
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 just uses conventions he is not used to

I think that after 25+ years of usage, I'm "used to it" by now.

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

#59
post #2

Now that CLI tools are in fashion again... has nobody thought to recreate a modern version of Turbo C++/Pascal? I know there's Emacs and vim, but they're far too programmable and bloated compared to the elegance of TC++, which did one job, and one job only, very well. Also, despite being an Emacs power user at this point, it's never going to be as ergonomic and well thought out with its arcane chords, while TC++ conv…

A hundred years ago I found something called XWPE and managed to build it for sco osr5, and then pretty much never used it for real.

(That doesn't imply I went with VS or similar fat ide, just that I didn't end up using xwpe for real. I tried code::blocks for a while but mostly just use geany or a plain editor.)

Post reply on HN