It's funny that students in the early 90s would use a pirated copy of turbo C or pascal, but in the early 2000s when Java took over curriculums, students couldn't access a decent IDE. Many never saw a debugger in action, and executed javac in a dos window.
That sounds unlikely. AFAIK both Eclipse and Netbeans have had pretty good debuggers since the early days, probably around 2002ish.
The 2nd year students I interacted with weren't aware of those and they weren't available in the PC labs at the university. I think there was something called BlueJ IDE as a learning tool.
> Visual Basic was the pinnacle of graphics programming I am still shocked how no tool since has managed to come even close to VB. You could easily develop a moderately complex GUI application that felt snappy in an afternoon. C# with WinForms is the second closest to that. All other iterations since have not been designed with individual developers in mind, sadly. A powerful developing alternative to this paradigm c…
The simplicity and efficiency of Visual Basic UI programming relied on several assumptions that became obsolete in 2000 when LCD and high-DPI displays became widely available. Everything in the VB UI editor was based on a fixed layout. There was a fixed font size, fixed DPI-density display expectation, and fixed button sizes. Every dialog assumed fixed sizes and was non-resizable. Adding a translation to such an appl…
> fixed DPI-density display
This part is maybe technically true but not in spirit. High-DPI didn't exist in Windows as a literal scaling percentage, but it had "Large Fonts" as an option which acted as a system-wide scale. VB GUIs were scalable based on twips (device-independent unit). The entire form and all controls would scale according to the Large Fonts setting.
Many of my VB6 forms were resizable. There was a simple library that let you have anchors in the Tag property so you didn't have to write any sizing logic yourself.
> it just uses conventions he is not used to ...and everyone else, including everyone who is also using a GUI on Linux - even if they use the GUI version of Emacs.
Yeah, basically when they said that it should’ve begged the question “why is he not used to those conventions?” And the answer would be because the conventions it uses aren’t used by anything else (which means they can barely be called conventions), and makes no effort to adopt any conventions of the platform it’s running on even just to get you started. Also, another user said it has a tutorial when opened which sho…
These conventions work in a lot of Linux GUI tools, in the built-in Git GUI, the shell and every text-box in MacOS.
I think these modern TUIs are a testament to the general failure of modern GUIs. It's not like they're particularly easier to write these. But since there's no remote GUI option, much less a portable remote GUI option, particularly one that's not just a video of an entire desktop, we're stuck with these. WHo wants to fire up an entire desktop to get open a simple utility app? Obviously the Web satisfies much of the d…
Failure of Linux Desktop you mean. RDP works great and GUI tooling for Windows and macOS is quite comparable to using VB, Delphi, Smalltalk like experiences.
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
It's funny that they keep renaming it and everyone still calls it AS/400. I remember when they wanted people to call it iSeries but everyone just still used AS/400. I didn't even know about the others you posted and I still use the AS/400 occasionally.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I worked with DOS in… WordPerfect? I don’t remember for sure which word processing application it was. But I honestly don’t remember ever seeing anything remotely “graphic“ in my DOS days.
Oh, there was. WordPerfect 6 had a full GUI mode with a very vaguely Win3-like GUI implemented in DOS. Borland Quattro Pro had one too. Microsoft Word could be flipped in and out of it: in it, you got WYSIWYG bold, italic, underline etc, and more lines on screen, but otherwise the UI remained much the same. PowerQuest imitated Win95 so well in PartitionMagic it was pixel-perfect. It was entirely a thing in the late D…
Things like Borland C and VB/WinForms really do take me to a simpler time. There was joy in being able to write simple programs very fast, in a more intuitive way, without needing to use browsers or frameworks or writing shaders to do the simplest things. Current systems are more powerful and versatile for sure, but for a teenager curious for coding they are a much less welcoming environment in a lot of ways. The eve…
Another aspect of the sheer number of technologies that you have to use is that you can’t do very much as a solo developer. It introduces a social aspect. You must work as part of a team. Especially when you have a public facing website or large scale. So the field is less appealing for someone who is a typical introvert. The types of personalities are completely different compared to those from the mid-90s or before…
I was talking about this with a friend earlier this week. The people who work in software these days seem much more extroverted and outgoing than the 'introverted nerd' stereotype from the 90s.
> And to your point about portability, if you're stuck on a non-linux OS, VNC/RDP aren't pretty but they'll get the job done. If you can make them working. Sorry you can't connect if user is logged on this computer. Whoops RDP session is active, so I will show you this black screen after typing your username and password until user disconnects (Why not kick out the user?). VNC is even bigger pain when you need to boo…
> I will show you this black screen Right, that's why I said RDP isn't pretty if you aren't on Linux. Windows insists on creating a separate desktop for each session. IIRC it has something to do with licensing, they don't like simultaneous users using one Windows license. > While on Windows you can just install TightVNC and it works. If you're resorting to installing third-party apps, you can install TightVNC on Linu…
I use ssh -X all the time (actually I have -X permanently enabled so it's always there - for the targets where I want to use it).
However, if there's any combination of latency and heavy X traffic (which can be found in surprising places), ssh doesn't cut it. Then a VNC is necessary. The difference can be as much as ten minutes of waiting for the GUI to come up, or nearly instantly if I have a VNC running.