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

91–100 of 607 posts

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

#91

Post by Surac »

I agree with emacs. It is a fantastic operating system but it lacks a good text editor. I remember using the Borland ide and miss there clear design language. Fighting with ide, gui and language is no fun. I miss the ide I could just start up over a rs232 connection and use it

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

#94

Post by ivankelly »

guerrilla wrote: post #31

I'm going to get punished for saying this, but I don't really see the point of IDEs when you have things like vim, Makefiles and bash. It just seems like more things to go wrong. I used Eclipse while I was doing Java development for a while and it had some conveniences but for the most part I just see it as one more thing that can go wrong and get in my way. Anyway, does anyone remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? I see…

I recall CodeWarrior being the official ide for SymbianOS when I started there. And it sucked, but likely more due to the integration. I think sucky custom rarely working IDEs is what pushed me to full time emacs

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

#95

Post by dardeaup »

andsoitis wrote: post #83

Delphi - fantastic, modern RAD IDE. Borland heritage. Can build native apps for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

Delphi is still very impressive. However, they missed out on a much greater opportunity. Part of Delphi's crown jewels is VCL which can only be used on Windows. If you use Delphi for an OS other than Windows you have to use FireMonkey/FMX. Lazarus has LCL which is VERY similar to VCL, but LCL on Lazarus is not limited to Windows. One can write a LCL application and it works the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If Delphi had extended VCL to macOS and Linux it would have become much more valuable. Just my $0.02.

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

#96

Post by 1313ed01 »

greatgib wrote: post #62

A little bit later, there was visual editors for gui app like Delphi and Visual Basic and co. Despite VB to be a little bit shitty, I think that a big loss happened in the GUI software development world since web apps became the norm. Not many remember this world where you could easily graphically create your UIs by placing components and that reactive interface were a given without effort. I really miss the original…

The nicest thing about programming for DOS (or probably any old home computer or console?) is that you are in full control of inputs and timing. If you only need to update the screen when the user hits a key for instance you can just call a function to wait for the next key-press, handle that, ask for the next... There is no async, no callbacks, no events, no threads. Nothing is easier than just imperative code doing things one line then the next, then the next. You can still have a main loop, but you do not need to, and if some function you call somewhere to handle something wants to wait for a key-press before returning it can do that and you do not have to yield or anything.

I'd love to see some modern environment replicate that somehow. Let us pretend everything is simple and synchronous even if it very much isn't.

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

#97

Post by layer8 »

dimitar wrote: post #23

I think Emacs still does all of this; the argument the author makes is that it is "arcane", it just uses conventions he is not used to. It is however fully self-documented and interactive. For me the best textual interface I've ever used remains Magit in Emacs: https://magit.vc/ I wish more of Emacs was like it. I actually use emacs as my git clients even when I'm using a different IDE for whatever reason.

To navigate a Turbo-Vision-style IDE and explore its functionality, you basically only need to know how the Alt and Tab keys work (okay, and Return and Esc and arrow keys), as alluded to in TFA. Emacs doesn’t quite have that base level of operating uniformity I think.

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

#98

Post by dardeaup »

pragmatic wrote: post #33

TUIs sucked and they still suck. Programmers are trying to bring them back bc nostalgia I guess? I floated the idea of TUIs to our data engineering team and got very negative responses. (My nostalgia for undergrad turbo pascal TUI I guess lol)

Some do and some don't. Have you ever used any to develop an application?

I suppose a lot of it is also relative. When I started with TUIs decades ago, we didn't have too many options. Turbo Pascal 5.5 or 6.0 was extremely nice to use back in the day.

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

#99

Post by jagged-chisel »

constantcrying wrote: post #35
marstall wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet zed is straight up slower than turbo c++

What? "Slower" how? And why would dev experience not matter more? TUIs are bizarre legacy technology, which are full of dirty hacks to somewhat emulate features every other desktop has. Why would any developer use them, when superior alternatives, not based on this legacy technology, exist and freely available?

Lots of opinions in the thread without any substance to back it up. If you don’t like TUIs and terminals, that’s ok. But if you actually want to argue against them, let’s hear a substantive argument. What specifically is so bad about the TUI?
Post reply on HN