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Comment by akrymski | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to imagine that 20 years ago Delphi and Visual Basic had far superior IDEs and debugging experience running on my 100 MHz IBM PC with 512MB of RAM.

I'm not sure where the ecosystem went wrong, but it's strangely related to the web.

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It went wrong, when young nice folks with fresh MBAs realized, that the point of diminishing returns for software quality can be very low. Just throw things into production and maybe catch some of the bigger foobars and let the hockey stick growth take over. Yes, you’ll loose some customers but more will come and it’s just not worth it spending time on shifting the exponent slightly to the left. Your evaluation will depend more on the exciting new features rolled out than the 3-per-cent-lower-than-predicted au growth.

This is slightly offtopic but windows 95 ran on 4mb of ram. 8mb was considered luxurious at the time. Visual Studio 6, launched in 1998, ran fine with 16mb of ram. It had almost all of the debugging features we have today, and it worked flawlessly every time.

Half a gigabyte of ram was, and still is, a gargantuan amount of memory.

win95 booted on 4MB, but nobody would call this running. 8MB was the norm for 486DX2 computers since 92. In 93 you had plenty of computers shipped standard with 16MB, for example this dell 466V https://books.google.com/books?id=XNt4ttAFAiwC&pg=PT2&dq=del... there are 10 computers in this issue being sold with 16MB. By 1995 Pentium with 16MB was standard, with 8MB relegated to bargain bin offers.

In the past you run your whole application as one piece on your machine, you could easily set a simple breakpoint and be done with it, now you have many interdependent components (microservices, 3rd party APIs), stuff running in the browser, stuff running in remote databases. It's like looking for a nail in a haystack. Even worse on production, you need to log every single call everywhere just in case you ever need to trace which random component caused that weird issue the client is complaining about.

Java IDEs still have the best tooling when it comes to debugging/observability, in my humble opinion so at least progress is not lost in every ecosystem.

Last time I used Eclipse, it took 8GBs of RAM. Have things changed?

In my opinion Eclipse is not as good as Jetbrains’s editors. But memory consumption is not the primary aspect to decide on that imo.

> 100 MHz IBM PC with 512MB of RAM

What kind of a strange beast was that? :)

I do remember fondly debugging in Delphi, but when using Perl and Python's debuggers I don't really miss it

I've written a few CPAN modules over the years but have never successfully used perl's interactive debugger (or, honestly, any other interactive debugger).

I do, however, know plenty of brilliant developers who can make interactive debuggers sing and respect different people preferring different approaches.

Note: If any of my perl code upsets the debugger it's because I didn't realise as a result of my preferences and I'll still consider it a bug.

> 100 MHz IBM PC with 512MB of RAM

That doesn't sound right. The "100 MHz" in the first half is too low for a machine from 20 years ago, and "512MB of RAM" for a modest machine of the same era is too high.

You are right, to be precise it was 1997 and I believe my 100 Mhz IBM PC was the 340 model which actually has 16 MBs of RAM. Running Windows 95/98, Visual Studio, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop, Cubase, etc.

Point still stands, you don't need 8 GBs.

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