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Comment by memsom | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Delphi 1. My first job was using Delphi and it was 1.0 we used to do most of the dev till we managed to go 32bit (circa 1998) and the IDE had absolutely no autocompletion nor did it have any suggestions. You needed to know what you were typing. I think it was Delphi 3 that introduced Borland's version of code completion (I want to say it was called "Code Sense", but that might be the Microsoft tools.) Even that was terrible till Delphi 5.

I think a lot of modern coders really forget how much you used to need to know. Even stuff like "jump to definition" wasn't a thing IIRC back then.

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> I think a lot of modern coders really forget how much you used to need to know. Even stuff like "jump to definition" wasn't a thing IIRC back then.

Also came through that era, I don't miss it, modern tools are abstractions for the brain (and a logical progression from what we had before).

Everything is so much bigger and more complex than it was (mostly because things are bolted together from a large number of libraries from different places with their own subtle or not so subtle conventions).

In days of you had the languages standard libraries and libraries you wrote yourself and very rarely some Hallowed Third Party Library that was handed down on stone tablets by the Prophets of the Finance Department.

Some stuff I miss, most I don't.

Sometimes I intentionally use primitive tools to force myself to write simple code.

Autocomplete requires CPU cycles for the lookup and "jump to definition" requires an index to be built somewhere (CPU again, but also mem/disk space). Modern computers can handle both efficiently nowadays, but not a simple task back then.

My memories of circa 1998 are rather different from OP. That's the year when Visual Basic 6 shipped, and that IDE had code completion working perfectly. Delphi 5 was out in 1999, and also worked great in that regard. Even C++ IDEs had code completion which worked decently well so long as templates weren't in the picture.

Pascal/Delphi is actually almost a perfect language to write a smart editor around: the grammar is highly regular and requires minimal lookahead to parse, and definitions always precede usage.

You need to remember - 1998, no Windows software was particularly "free". If you wanted to upgrade, you paid. The company I was working for was stuck at Delphi 1 (as the code was 16bit and had an in house 16bit DLL that needed to be replaced and was core to the application.) Some of the other products were on Delphi 2 or 3. Once we reengineered the DLL (it was using pure 16bit assembler to implement a look-up tree in memory, so it took them a while to make a 32bit version), we moved on. I think we were on Delphi 4 by the time I left around 2000.

Next 3 companies I worked for were using Delphi 5, despite Delphi 6, 7 and 8 existing by that point. Same reason - if it isn't broken, you don't need to jump to the next best thing.

Also worth noting - the company I directly worked for after the one above was a Borland partner in the UK and Borland outsourced training and consultancy to them (I was under Borland NDA) and we therefore had access to pretty much all the Borland software (I have a copy of the first Kylix Beta somewhere still I think)

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