Revolutionary IDEs That Shaped Software Development | Hacker News Reader

Revolutionary IDEs That Shaped Software Development

medium.com

9 pointszdw13 comments

Sort of off topic... but IDEs...

You know that one guy in the office that _really_ knows Excel? Like he wrote a 3d engine in it or something or you give him a csv, then using all keyboard shortcuts he plots a whole tablet of graphs with blazing speed and never touches the mouse in under a min?

Well, in simliar vain, what surprises me is how few developers _actually_ know how to use an IDE. Most of the time, I see people using using ultra-minimalist glorified text editors with maybe a bit of auto-completion. Or they use a full blown IDE as basically a fancy text editor but still run tests or start servers at the command line, instead of embedded in the IDE.

Take Eclipse and IntelliJ. They have everything from type inference, inline refactoring, extractions, generations, to variable name guessing. Basically you can write an entire website by pushing cntrl-space repeatedly. What's surprising is the far _less_ powerful VsCode is far more popular and has less features that both Eclipse and IntelliJ and is far more glitchy than both.

I'm trying to push the juniors to learn the IDE as a skill in itself. You can be far more productive by running your tests natively inside in your IDE, or launching a server directly in the IDE with hot code swap. We've got a wiki of keyboard shortcuts for each system as well as an internal handbook on how set everything up for each one for maximum productivity. Yet I'm still amazed people insist on far inferior tools, and their productivity matches.

> You can be far more productive by running your tests natively inside in your IDE, or launching a server directly in the IDE with hot code swap.

What makes these things faster in an IDE? I.e., these things don't seem slow to begin with (usually up arrow in a terminal and hit enter). I can see iterating through and fixing errors/test failures, but there are tons of ways of handling that that don't require an IDE.

It's a very subjective topic, but not having any of the Borland turbo compilers there makes the article objectively wrong

And no Smalltalk-80.

Borland was the instant first thing I thought of from the title. It would be the defining example if you asked me.

My first IDE was Visual Basic 6, before that it was QBasic which was bundled with the Win95 CD.

VB6 was just incredible with what you could glue together so quickly and easily.

Even VB1 was near miraculous for the time. It catches a lot of flack, but VB took Windows programming (which formerly required knowledge of C, $600 worth of tooling, and a multi-step build process) and made it a $99.99 drag/drop affair.

Charles Petzold's comments on "Hello World" in early Windows give a bit of a flavor of what Windows programming was like prior to VB.

http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2014/12/The-Infamous-Wind...

It's a listicle and a bad one at that. The author considers vi/vim to be an IDE and that Word and Excel also count due to VBA.

This is all subjective, but I'd include Omnicore Codeguide. IIRC, it was the first Java IDE with near-real-time compilation int he background. It was pretty amazing.

Visual Age for Java was my favorite in the early days, too. ECJ was fast and it had great, fast validation in the IDE too.

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https://archive.is/BaE8Z

Screenshot of vb3 makes me feel very nostalgic. I think I was 12 when I first tried it and it seemed magical.

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