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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)

#551

Post by pjmlp »

sheepscreek wrote: post #357

> 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…

Delphi, C++ Builder, and there are still other ones around like Xojo.

Problem is the amount of Electron crap nowadays.

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

#552

Post by pjmlp »

int_19h wrote: post #409
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…

Visual Studio still supports WinForms including the graphical form designer, which is very close to the OG Delphi experience in late 90s (esp. since WinForms is such a blatant rip off VCL).

You are missing a step there, before Windows Forms there was WFC, Windows Foudation Classes (not to mix with the other WFC from .NET), used in J++, one of the reasons for Sun's lawsuit.

Alongside events, and J/Direct the percursor to P/Invoke.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/1998/03/10/microsoft-visua...

It was WFC that was the rip off, WinForms is basically WFC redone in C#.

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

#553

Post by lproven »

gcanyon wrote: post #547
lproven wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My time with WP ended with version 3? maaaybe 4

Are you sure? Your earlier comments expressed uncertainty if it was WordPerfect at all.

WordPerfect on the PC was a very niche app before version 4.2 which was the big hit. I knew a tiny handful of places that had copies of the older version but they weren't running it.

It is on the edge of before my time -- I started my first job in late 1988 -- but before WP 4.2, WordStar still dominated, with some specialist users running DisplayWrite or MultiMate. I'm not American and I think the US market was different with shareware taken slightly more seriously, so more presence of PC Write, and maybe XyWrite or other tools little seen in the British Isles.

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

#554

Post by elric »

kristianp wrote: post #541
elric wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueJ

That sounds like a teaching problem instead of a tooling problem.

Snark aside, I think there's value in teaching the basics first (e.g. compiling stuff with javac) before moving on to using magic to hide the complexity.

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

#555

Post by Grumbledour »

thw_9a83c wrote: post #502
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simplicity and efficiency of Visual Basic UI programming relied on several assumptions that became obsolete in 2000 This is a great point that extends beyond rebutting the rose-colored glasses for the gool ole days of programming. While yes, things were simpler. That simplicity came at a cost. For instance, how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities?

> how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities? Coincidentally, they were very accessible because they used corresponding Win32 components for all logical UI entities, despite being fixed in layout. Therefore, they worked really well with screen readers. Sadly, this is not the case with UI frameworks, which render the screen as a Vulcan/DirectX/OpenGL canvas. By the way, for today's Electr…

And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people. No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode support.

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

#556

Post by lproven »

lproven wrote: post #511
robenkleene wrote: post #245

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.

> So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison Can do. > especially if they prefer WordStar. I don't. I dislike both WS and Vi. Vi (and its variants, I am covering all of them here) is a Unix tool. In the 1980s, Unix was big and expensive, and usually ran on boxes so expensive they had to be shared. So, mainly found in academia and research. WordStar is a CP/M tool which bec…

> They do not assume theys

"They do not assume these."

What a bizarre typo. Sorry about that.

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

#557

Post by OCTAGRAM »

Such recallings are incomplete without fake TUIs. TUI that are seemingly text, but in graphics mode. Norton Utilities were running in text mode with altered fonts and had nice UI elements. Acronis OS Selector 5 could run in multitude of different modes: ordinary text mode with pseudographics; Norton Utilities-alike text mode with altered fonts; VGA graphics mode; SVGA graphics mode. But whatever mode, it was drawing UI in a grid. Mouse cursor was the only thing not bound to grind, but when windows were dragged by mouse, they were jumping by discrete steps, staying grid aligned at all times. I was digging in. They are Watcom C++ binaries, and Watcom can remote debug them over COM port. No sources, of course, but I can trace CPU and watch memory. So far I know that it indeed has a concept of text buffer, and each cell is 4 bytes. These bytes encode background glyphs and colors. Text can be over window title, so window title skin is encoded in background glyph. Text can be over tab title. Text can be over button. And there are icons of operating systems in the list. And there are icons on toolbar buttons.

Acronis OS Selector 5 features not much UI. There is FDISK, advanced enough for its time. It can resize FAT partitions, and there is UI for adjusting size and other stuff. There is HTML-based help system with hyperlinks. And there is some editor for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. Acronis OS Selector 5 is about switching OSes, and specific DOS or Windows 9x boot configurations are also "OSes", so editing of boot files is helpful. But apart from that there is almost nothing to do in this OS Selector.

I wish something more daily would be coded in such UI, but nope. And Acronis dropped that style. I don't know what happened with Selector 6 and 7, but it's like 8 is coming right after 5, and 8 UI is not grid-aligned anymore.

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

#558

Post by 4gotunameagain »

aadhavans wrote: post #549
supportengineer wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is also due to the popularisation of computers, the internet and internet culture.

Everyone and their aunts now are into computers, and one in x is a software "engineer". Back in the day, it was only the hardcore nerds that were attracted to these things :)

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

#559

Post by account42 »

thw_9a83c wrote: post #487
sheepscreek wrote: post #357

> 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…

Qt Designer can do visual design for flexible layouts quite well.

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

#560

Post by account42 »

Grumbledour wrote: post #555
thw_9a83c wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities? Coincidentally, they were very accessible because they used corresponding Win32 components for all logical UI entities, despite being fixed in layout. Therefore, they worked really well with screen readers. Sadly, this is not the case with UI frameworks, which render the screen as a Vulcan/DirectX/OpenGL canvas. By the way, for today's Electr…

And to add to that, because some people might not know or have forgotten, colors where easily adjustable in winforms, so dark mode, high contrast mode, green, blue, hot pink etc. were all easily adjustable for all these apps and back in th day that was pretty standard to do for visually impaired people. No extra work from programmers was necessary, so vastly superior to today where you have to beg for good dark mode…

"Dark mode" today is the biggest scam - selling us a neutered form of color schemes that used to be a standard feature of any UI toolkit as something new and exciting.
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