Hacker News Reader

Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I agree with his sentiment - it's something I have said here on HN several times - but I disagree with his word choice. Unix is not an integrated development environment. To me, an IDE implies a monolithic program. Unix is not that. To differentiate it, I'm tempted to say that Unix is a distributed development environment to get across that the tools you use for development do not exist in one monolithic program. But I don't like that phrasing, either. Rather, I prefer this:

Unix is a development environment.

View on HN

This actually occurred to me as I was writing it; I tried to decide whether it was better to call it more accurately what it was, or refer to it as something with which people were more familiar and hence have a concept to which to relate it. So for reference I actually agree with your comment.

Yes, one might say that the "I" part of IDE is there to differentiate it from the typical Unix style.

Kernighan and Pike called their book "The Unix Programming Environment" (sooo highly recommended), so I' go with "PE" instead of the high-falutin' "DE".

To be fair: the "I" differentiated it from the typical Unix style as implemented on MSDOS, which for obvious reasons sucked rocks. No editing while building, no pipes at all (and thus no log analysis in the traditional sense), etc...

Got any sources for the term originating on DOS?

Sources? No. But the first IDEs were products like Turbo Pascal, and the term originated to distinguish them from the official Microsoft C Compiler environment (and others: Mark William's C, etc...) which was unix-like.

So you wouldn't consider Smalltalk, Mesa or a lisp machine to be an IDE?

Sure they are, but they were't marketed using the term "IDE". That acronym appeared AFAIK in the late 1980's in the IBM PC world, and it was used to distinguish those software products from the unix-like MS tools.

1983

> Symbolics 36000 Technical Summary

> Overview

> ...

> The Symbolics 3600 is a 36-bit single-user computer designed for high-productivity software development and for the execution of large symbolic programs. ...

> The system software constitutes a large-scale programming environment ... Object-oriented programming techniques are used throughout the 3600 system to provide a reliable and extensible integrated environment without the usual division between an operating system and programming languages ...

---

There you have 'development' and ' extensible integrated environment'.

I used to agree with this, but my mind changed after seeing Brent Victor's presentation[1] on how code and result can be integrated. Even Smalltalk's ambient can't compare (which is understandable, as it is much older).

[1] http://vimeo.com/36579366

Clayton Christensen talked about this idea as integrated vs. modular. He actually used the example of unix as modular and Windows as integrated (though he there was talking about the ability to create different distributions of unix, mix-and-matching components).

BTW: I like his use of "IDE" to convey his point succinctly. Though I had the same reaction as you, he's using it as a word, not an acronym. Also, there's a category error of application vs. OS which I think adds to the wry quirkiness.

How about "DDE" -- decentralized development environment ?

A old windows hacker might get confused with Dynamic Data Exchange :)

Naah... the name is just good, call it what you want - IDE, PE,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com