The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost
The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
I REALLY hate articles like this
Saying we "lost" this software just shows that people don't understand what software design/engineering is.
Basically every screenshot of the "lost" TUIs look like a normal emacs/vim session for anyone who has learned about splits and
:term(guess which god I believe in?). And people still use those near constantly. Hell, my workflow is generally a mix between vim and vscode depending upon what machine and operation I am working on. And that is a very normal workflow.And that is what we want out of software development. The good ideas move forward. The less good ideas become plugins for sickos. Because everyone loves vscode right now but... Microsoft is shitting that up REAL fast with copilot and just wait until every employer on the planet realizes that and ban it.
And the rest just ignores the point of an IDE. Yes, taking your hand off the keyboard to touch the mouse LOWERS YOUR EFFICIENCY*. But it also means you can switch between languages or even environments trivially. Yes, it is often more annoying to dig through twelve menus to find what you want or talk a co-worker through how to do basic git operations that would be three commands. But holy crap I hate the people who "can't work without my settings" that mean they are incapable of doing any "live" debugging or doing any peer programming where they aren't driving.
Back in the day we had plenty of people who were angry that not everyone was using vi and a bunch of tcsh scripts to develop because it clearly meant they didn't understand what they were doing and were too dependent on compilers and debuggers. And it was just as stupid then as it is now.
Yes, the title the author chose is a bit err, clickbaity. But there were still decent introductions to few old IDEs. Maybe if he had covered more(maybe some niche ones?), it would have been better.
Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.
But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit...): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but...). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.
Because good (uncopyrighted...) ideas propagate. That is development and design.
I was developing 30 years ago and I love what's available today. Nostalgia is fine, as far as it goes, but things change and sometimes for the better. This is one of those cases.
I was using emacs then, I'm using emacs now, and I'll be using emacs in another 30 years.
No vim?
Vim is mentioned 5 times in the article!