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Comment by Moru | Hacker News Reader

I'm missing a lot of the ones I used. Though most of them weren't that different from normal texteditors in a terminal. Well, they were actually editors in a terminal...

Cobol on an IBM AS/400

RPG also on an IBM AS/400 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

Devpac Assembler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSoft_Systems

STOS Basic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOS_BASIC

PLC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller

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The Amiga version of STOS, AMOS, was nice and quite popular. Wasn't as fast as Blitz Basic II though.

There were some interesting "multimedia authoring systems" on the Amiga which might warrant inclusion, such as Amiga Vision (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7KIZQzYSls) and Scala (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k20Wvlqb96g)

The modern "descendants" of the latter could be said to be Hollywood, which is alo available on non-Amiga platforms:

http://www.hollywood-mal.com/screenshots.html

Jonathan Edward's research has explored novel ways of programming, so naturally this selection is going to be more focused on atypical interfaces. Those environments that you used are very similar to current programming systems, and so they probably don't make the cut of being thought provoking and informative to look at in 2018. Beyond the historical curiosity and nostalgia, that is.

The Wikipedia page doesn’t really give any impression of what it’s like to program in RPG with SEU, and with SDA. I wouldn’t say they’re very close to using vi or Emacs at all.

I have very bad memories of STOS BASIC, mostly around how very slow it was.

The RPG we used was column based, Flag number in this column, command in that column and so on. We used paper to do the program and then keyed in on a terminal emulator running on a ps/2 that was connected to the central computer over a modem. When running programs they got put in a batch queue and we had to wait until it was our turn and then the printer started spitting out the resulting data. You made sure to think before running things :-)

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