Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)

blogsystem5.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 607 posts

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

#581

Post by Syntonicles »

bowsamic wrote: post #444
Syntonicles wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Magit for years, and have never noticed any bugs. The interface is unique and takes a lot of getting used to. I did need to leverage my extensive experience with Git and Emacs to understand unexpected behaviour but the fault always lay with me. Given the implications of bugs in such a critical part of a developer's workflow, can you be more specific?

Mainly random lisp errors being thrown in certain cases, likely just unimplemented functionality, I didn't record them since there are so many. I probably see one every other day but usually it's somewhat outside of the normal operation of magit. It still feels like a bug though, and very likely is. I mean, magit is not some perfect piece of software. Of course it has bugs, I just hit them quite a lot. The slowness i…

That sounds frustrating! It hasn't been my experience at all.

I'm an enthusiast when it comes to [Vanilla] Emacs. I enjoy customizing my editor, jumping into the Lisp when I find an error, and contributing - though my own config is usually the problem.

This sounds like an opportunity to improve the day-to-day for developers!

Please report any verified bugs to Github. There are only 12 open issues, most of them enhancement requests. The maintainers are celebrated in the community for their diligence and attentive engagement, and I'm sure they'd love to help.

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

#582

Post by brucehoult »

Narishma wrote: post #295
brucehoult wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that emacs predates Apple developing cmd-z/x/c/v and Microsoft copying Apple in Windows. Before that, the most commonly copied keystrokes in programmer's editors were the freaking Wordstar ones e.g. in all the Borland products. Also OP apparently has no knowledge of the far better IDEs we had 30-40 years ago including but not limited to: - Apple MPW, 1986. GUI editor where every window is (potentially) a…

All your example are in the Apple ecosystem. Depending on where the author is from, it may not be that surprising that they wouldn't know about them. In my corner of the wolrd, Apple was basically non-existent until the iPod and iPhone.

Fortunately my little isolated island chain [1] in the South Pacific Ocean was one of the places where there was someone who brought in early Commodore, Tandy, and Apple machines only a couple of years after the USA and by 1979 or 1980 there were stores in my nearest 40,000 pop provincial city that stocked and repaired them. My school got an Apple ][+ right at the end of 1980, just as I graduated, but the Math HoD [2] asked me to take it home for some of the holidays before I started university and figure it out and come and explain it to him.

A few months after I got my first job after university I persuaded my boss to get the new Apple LaserWriter (in fact the demo unit from the launch), which I connected to the company's Data General "mainframe" (MV10000) and programmed in raw Postscript. In 1987, when the Mac got good enough (e.g. Mac II) we got on those those too as it was just sooo much better than a PC/AT.

[1] NZ

[2] who died just over two years ago, aged 99 1/2, we'd kept in touch the intervening 40+ years

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

#583

Post by eikenberry »

int_19h wrote: post #411
eikenberry wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about needing to live in a teletype world, it is about how language/text is just a better interface for a general use computer. Computers primary feature is that they are programmable and an interface that allows you to take advantage of that is superior to one that doesn't. The programmable GUIs all failed to gain traction (smalltalk and like), that left the shell (and maybe spreadsheets) as the best UI for…

The reason why GUIs became so popular so quickly after they were introduced is because text is not "just a better interface for a general use computer". Like OP, I remember the days when command line was all you had, and even then we used stuff like TUI file managers to mitigate the pain of it.

But GUIs never took off as a UI for a general purpose computer, they became the UI for application on a general purpose computer. For them to be the former requires them to be programmable. Smalltalk is the best/most-famous example of a Graphical UI for a general purpose computer I can think of...

The main point is that for a general purpose computer the UI needs to integrate programming. Programming is how you use a computer. The shell (text) is currently the primary UI that inherently allows programming.

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

#584

Post by igouy »

eikenberry wrote: post #583
int_19h wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why GUIs became so popular so quickly after they were introduced is because text is not "just a better interface for a general use computer". Like OP, I remember the days when command line was all you had, and even then we used stuff like TUI file managers to mitigate the pain of it.

But GUIs never took off as a UI for a general purpose computer, they became the UI for application on a general purpose computer. For them to be the former requires them to be programmable. Smalltalk is the best/most-famous example of a Graphical UI for a general purpose computer I can think of... The main point is that for a general purpose computer the UI needs to integrate programming. Programming is how you use a…

Is a modern phone a general purpose computer?

What kind-of UI does a modern phone present?

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

#586

Post by ninalanyon »

robenkleene wrote: post #333
ninalanyon wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are control key sequences that are arranged so that a typist need never remover their fingers from the keyboard. The control key was to the left of the A so easily pressed with you left little finger. You had full control of the cursor without the need for dedicated arrow keys or page up and down keys. It worked on a normal terminal keyboard. I first used it on an Apple ][ with a Z80 add-on that ran CP/M.

Thanks for sharing! I'd consider all those things true for Emacs/Vim bindings as well? (Just curious if you'd disagree with that assessment.)

That's true-ish. But the thing about Wordstar is that it is a word processor not a text editor. Other word processors don't make this so easy. Also the standard keybindings for cursor control in Emacs are much less ergonomic.

^ = control

In Wordstar: ^S/^D moves left/right; ^E/^X moves up/down; ^A/^F word left/right; ^R/^C moves page Up/Down

Notice that all of those use only the left hand. In Wordstar almost everything to do with cursor control uses only the left hand.

Emacs is mnemonic ^b for left (back), ^f for right (forward), ^n for next line, ^p for previous line, etc. You need both hands and the keys are all over the keyboard.

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

#587

Post by project2501 »

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…

> 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

Yes, everything in the layout was fixed, unless you chose to resize it through code

I've developed many applications in VB that dynamically resized every control to maintain a consistent UI regardless of the window size

I mean, simple things like this

textarea.width = form.width - ( textarea.left * 2 )

to keep it centered and preserved the margins

Granted, for complex layouts, it quickly evolved into a dedicated procedure to resize all controls in the correct order and handle edge cases. But it was absolutely doable, even by an amateur teenage programmer

I think other IDEs (Delphi maybe?) had anchors and other helpful features to assist with resizing

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

#588

Post by geophile »

niutech wrote: post #563
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.

I did, very briefly. It did not compare to Intellij.

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

#589

Post by jama211 »

1718627440 wrote: post #579
jama211 wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

emacs conventions do?

Eh yes? They are mostly readline conventions. What's the question?

Which conventions do you mean specifically? Like copy/paste shortcuts? The buttons you use for navigating UI?

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

#590

Post by jimbokun »

lproven wrote: post #494
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is however fully self-documented and interactive. Unfortunately not true. I've fired up emacs once or twice, and couldn't even figure out how to save a document because it didn't show me how to do that. It might be more documented than vi (but that bar is *on the floor, vi has one of the most discovery-hostile user interfaces ever made), but it's not self-documented enough to just pick up and use with no instruc…

> couldn't even figure out how to save a document 100% this. It is ( counts on fingers ) 43 years since I got my first computer of my own, and I've been using Unix-like OSes since just 6 years later in 1988... So, 37 years? Still, even now, Emacs is this bizarre thing that teleported in from 1962 or something. Older than Unix, older than -- well, anything else still used by almost anyone except Cobol and Fortran. I a…

VS Code is the spiritual successor to the Emacs architecture, with JavaScript instead of Elisa.
Post reply on HN