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No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

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Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#51

Post by pjmlp »

raychis wrote: post #19

This period lasted quite some time. In the mid 00s it was still like this. I remember writing code in notepad and vim. Version managers like tortoiseSVN were a total game changer when it came to collaborating. I still think learning like this is the best way to truly understand things. Neovim still my favourite IDE.

Definitely, up to 2003 I only had access to dial up outside work, meaning I could not just go online every time I felt like doing it.

And during the 90's while at the university, not even that, at home zero Internet, I could not afford paying for dial up as student, other expenses were more relevant.

You would regularly find students on the campus at weekend that were there only to check stuff on Internet.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#53

Post by pjmlp »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #39

Dont forget: Back then, after shoving tons of floppy disks (later 600MB CDs) for installing just the IDE and the compiler etc., you had to shovel another tower of media into the machine just to get the "help/doc" function installed :-D

A customised mix of Turbo Pascal and MS-DOS 3.3 could fit in a 3.5 inch high density floppy, meaning 1.44 MB for the young folks.

I know that because I used to carry one for use on high school computer lab.

Then a couple others for programs.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#54

Post by BirAdam »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
BirAdam wrote: post #25

You can always just use vim, no plugins, and a book. No one said that one must use a fancy IDE and online stuff.

Actually no, because vim was created in 1991, during the 80s it was classical vi.

Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#55

Post by brycewray »

Loved that era. Although my main computing back then involved the "Skinny Mac" and (at work) PCs, I also tinkered with eight-bit Ataris. Even got a very bare-bones Atari BASIC program, "Line Deleter," published in the January, 1986, issue of COMPUTE! Magazine.[0]

[0]: https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/index/?issue=issue68

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#56

Post by pjmlp »

BirAdam wrote: post #54
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no, because vim was created in 1991, during the 80s it was classical vi.

Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.

Another one, Linux did not exist in the 1980's.

Naturally the old workflows are achievable today, including the TUI craziness, as if curses and dialog never happened.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#57

Post by KellyCriterion »

pjmlp wrote: post #53
KellyCriterion wrote: post #39

Dont forget: Back then, after shoving tons of floppy disks (later 600MB CDs) for installing just the IDE and the compiler etc., you had to shovel another tower of media into the machine just to get the "help/doc" function installed :-D

A customised mix of Turbo Pascal and MS-DOS 3.3 could fit in a 3.5 inch high density floppy, meaning 1.44 MB for the young folks. I know that because I used to carry one for use on high school computer lab. Then a couple others for programs.

Visual C++ was one CD + at least 2 x MSDN CDs

Turbo Pascal for Windows: https://www.techspot.com/news/101067-turbo-pascal-celebrates...

This was, IIRC, several floppy discs?

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#58

Post by BirAdam »

pjmlp wrote: post #56
BirAdam wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Linux systems just symlink vim to vi, and it launches in a compatibility mode. Vim without plugins is still close. Old workflows can still be achieved. The user simply has to really want that experience.

Another one, Linux did not exist in the 1980's. Naturally the old workflows are achievable today, including the TUI craziness, as if curses and dialog never happened.

Sure, but people could also just use BSD. The point is not vim or Linux. The point is that what the author appears to enjoy, a simple editor and a book, is easily accomplished still today.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#59

Post by pjmlp »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A customised mix of Turbo Pascal and MS-DOS 3.3 could fit in a 3.5 inch high density floppy, meaning 1.44 MB for the young folks. I know that because I used to carry one for use on high school computer lab. Then a couple others for programs.

Visual C++ was one CD + at least 2 x MSDN CDs Turbo Pascal for Windows: https://www.techspot.com/news/101067-turbo-pascal-celebrates... This was, IIRC, several floppy discs?

Except you are talking about mid-90s already.

TPW was about 7 disks, and when it got released, there were already 6 versions released for MS-DOS.

Followed by Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS still, with TPW being replaced with Delphi.

Re: No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s

#60

Post by adrian_b »

lelanthran wrote: post #48
adrian_b wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1990, I was using the BRIEF editor on MS-DOS, which was an editor for programmers and which was quite similar to Emacs (also including a scripting language somewhat similar to LISP). BRIEF must have already existed for some years. It had a completely configurable auto-complete, which I rewrote to insert big code templates in the languages that I was using (C, C++, Fortran, Basic, assembly), covering almost all boi…

I started a job (moving cities for this new job) in 2004 and found my boss (at that time, a grizzled old veteran of computing) using BRIEF. I recall him trying to convince me to switch to it a few times, from vim. I never found it as advanced as vim, but I could see the capabilities. I recall being impressed by some macro he had that improved navigation, both within a file and opening new files. I also recall him bei…

Out-of-the-box, BRIEF was not especially impressive.

Its strength was its embedded scripting language, which may have been inspired by Emacs LISP.

With the scripting language, you could change everything, including the behavior of any key press or of any combination of keys.

Thus you could create a personalized editor that had no resemblance with BRIEF as originally delivered and you could parse the source text of the edited programs and do arbitrary transformations or analyses and you could invoke any external tools for building a software project and it handled the compiling error messages, so it could work as a complete IDE. It also included a tiled windows manager.

Therefore, it is likely that there have been as many different BRIEF editors as BRIEF users, as long as they hacked the set of scripts originally delivered with it.

The only editor that I am aware of and which has a so powerful scripting language is Emacs and its derivatives. Because Emacs is even older than BRIEF, I assume that it was the source of inspiration for BRIEF. I have used vim for many years. I was satisfied with it, but it was not so easy to customize as BRIEF was.

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