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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)

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically these days the built-in "remote desktop" feature in Gnome is literally RDP.

Not really ironic. The GNOME team are mostly paid by the same company as the Wayland team (and the Flatpak team and the OStree team and the systemd team) and that team wants to replace X.org with its own new tool.

I said "ironically" because it also works much better than X remoting, or for that matter VNC. Which isn't really new, it's just amusing to see this finally acknowledged by desktop Linux.

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

#592

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…

CLI is also specific to apps in practice, and I don't see any obvious difference between scripted CLI and scripted (with the likes of Active Scripting or AppleScript, or for that matter Tcl etc) GUI apps.

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

#593
post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#.

Indeed, but very few people remember J++ or WFC, so I simplified that story.

Either way, someone coming from VCL will see a lot of familiar things in System.ComponentModel.

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

#594
post #5

Speaking of bloat: why are binaries from Rust or (much worse) Go so damn huge? This is in release mode with debug off. It’s weird because memory use for the same sorts of programs is not much worse than other languages. In Rust memory use seems comparable to C++. In Go there’s a bit more overhead but it’s still smaller than the binary. So all this is not being loaded. I get the sense devs just don’t put a lot of effo…

[deleted]

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

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You mean ELisp?

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

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are visual UI editors that p…

Even Java's Swing, introduced in 1999 (or maybe 98 in beta?), dealt with the problem of dynamic layouts fairly well. Of course, it performed like an absolute dog to begin with, but most of the performance kinks were dealt with during the Java 1.3 era (2000), and by 1.4 in 2002/3 or so, performance was absolutely fine, with most of the rendering quirks of the native look and feels having been dealt with as well. Movin…

Swing is still a thing, at least for all of those using JetBrains products, and still comes wiht the JDK, whereas JavaFX was placed into open source, and I think it only carries forward thanks to Gluon's work.

In what concerns layout managers in .NET, you could do it in Windows Forms via TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel.

WPF has always used layout managers from the get go, which is why its drag and drop workflow feels strange to Windows Form devs.

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

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Try to do JNI development in Intellij, with debugging across languages like in Netbeans.

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

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are visual UI editors that p…

Even Java's Swing, introduced in 1999 (or maybe 98 in beta?), dealt with the problem of dynamic layouts fairly well. Of course, it performed like an absolute dog to begin with, but most of the performance kinks were dealt with during the Java 1.3 era (2000), and by 1.4 in 2002/3 or so, performance was absolutely fine, with most of the rendering quirks of the native look and feels having been dealt with as well. Movin…

> But I do find myself often yearning for the "simplicity" of desktop app development.

Yep, isn't it great to use an API that is actually all about UI widgets, rather than having to indirect through a document markup language.

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

#600
post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Java's Swing, introduced in 1999 (or maybe 98 in beta?), dealt with the problem of dynamic layouts fairly well. Of course, it performed like an absolute dog to begin with, but most of the performance kinks were dealt with during the Java 1.3 era (2000), and by 1.4 in 2002/3 or so, performance was absolutely fine, with most of the rendering quirks of the native look and feels having been dealt with as well. Movin…

Swing is still a thing, at least for all of those using JetBrains products, and still comes wiht the JDK, whereas JavaFX was placed into open source, and I think it only carries forward thanks to Gluon's work. In what concerns layout managers in .NET, you could do it in Windows Forms via TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel. WPF has always used layout managers from the get go, which is why its drag and drop workflow…

Yeah, but those layout managers came later. I don’t think they were there in the early 2000s.

I’ll say this for Microsoft: they supported WinForms, even adding new features, long after it had ceased to be the new hotness. Whether they still do, I don’t know. The last time I touched WinForms was 2013.

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