IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023) • Hacker News Board

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

#561

Post by OCTAGRAM » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 10:49 AM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #363

spwa4 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCL was ported to linux in the "Kylix" product, for both Pascal and C++. It was non-free and didn't see any uptake really.

IIRC it wasn't VCL but another framework like VCL that was built on Qt. LCL (Lazarus' equivalent of VCL) took another approach where the base stuff are very Windows-y (due to the VCL heritage) but the backends have to essentially implement not only the backend-specific (Gtk, Qt, etc) widget functionality but also a small subset of the Windows API. While this makes porting harder for the Lazarus developers, it makes i…

It was called CLX, forms were stored in *.xfm, and it was based on Qt

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

#562

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#563

Post by niutech » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

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…

Have you tried NetBeans? It's more intuitive and snappier than e.g. Eclipse.

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

#564

Post by niutech » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 11:19 AM UTC

never_inline wrote: post #501

carra wrote: post #450

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…

Try flutter.

Flutter is not native on any platform, it's just a canvas with painted custom controls. Nothing compared to lightweight native Win32 apps in VB6.

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

#565

Post by never_inline » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

niutech wrote: post #564

never_inline wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try flutter.

Flutter is not native on any platform, it's just a canvas with painted custom controls. Nothing compared to lightweight native Win32 apps in VB6.

It has a much better language and works across platforms. these things have real value.

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

#566

Post by random29ah » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

It's sad that no one has commented about Ultimate++ ( https://www.ultimatepp.org ).

I believe it's the easiest way (at least for me) to quickly create GUI programs.

But of course, nothing beats Borland's interface from the DOS era.

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

#567

Post by neutronicus » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #458

neutronicus wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah for whatever reason Shift+Insert is the more "sticky" memory for me. I think because I also use it in Windows terminals.

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

#568

Post by NetMageSCW » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

never_inline wrote: post #565

niutech wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter is not native on any platform, it's just a canvas with painted custom controls. Nothing compared to lightweight native Win32 apps in VB6.

It has a much better language and works across platforms. these things have real value.

It used a language that few know and that has little local knowledge and support. It uses its own widgets and conventions to be cross platform instead of using native controls. These things are real downsides.

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

#569

Post by NetMageSCW » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

igouy wrote: post #278

pjmlp wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my introduction to Smalltalk.

ditto So much better than the TUI Smalltalk/V

Methods.

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

#570

Post by NetMageSCW » Mon, Oct 20, 2025, 2:30 PM UTC

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…

If you are willing to forego the GUI development, LINQPad is an amazing interactive environment for creating libraries to help your scripting and then speed up the scripting of small tasks. It is fast and easy enough that I’ve used it for complicated processing of small (a few screens) of text instead of emacs, but powerful enough to run queries against phone systems or import GB of CSV and produce an Excel summary.