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Comment by fulladder | Hacker News Reader

I think programming was a fairly miserable experience on all platforms before about 2000. In the early days, there wasn't enough surplus computation available to devote any of it to programmer ergonomics. Today we have IDEs that can make accurate autocomplete suggestions, compilers with detailed error messages (and even suggestions on what the mistake probably is), shells that tab complete really effectively, etc. Before ~2000, there just weren't enough spare cycles to do any of that stuff particularly well.

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The biggest advantage I found when learning on DOS and Windows in the 1990s was the overall lack of distractions. No smart phone, YouTube, Reddit/HackerNews let me fully concentrate.

Yeah, I totally agree. Computers for a long time were not a communications device the way they are today. You could buy a modem and use it communicate, but that was a distinct activity and once exited the terminal program you were once again by yourself.

Now, the communications function is this always on thing that never goes away. It's interwoven with every other activity you do. That makes the whole experience much different.

I'd quite like to drop our internet connection. If I needed to do something online I could visit my local cafe or library.

There is no way my family would agree to that though.

My first IDE experience was in 1992, with Borland tools, which I used most of them until 2000.

During this time using UNIX was a pain, only lessen by an heavily customized version of XEmacs.

On Amiga, Windows, Mac OS and OS/2, no biggie, there were good IDE experiences already.

The change happened in the 80s with Borland’s Turbo products.

I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. The compilers were insanely fast compared to what had come before. But I still think that programmer ergonomics sucked. There was no syntax highlighting, definitely no autocomplete, and it couldn't necessarily find all the syntax errors on the first pass, so you'd fix a few errors, recompile, and there'd be a new set of errors. That's my recollection anyway.

It was 1991's Turbo C++ 3.0 (they merged Turbo C and Turbo C++ with that product) that had syntax highlighting and code folding, so it wasn't the 80s :-). Hard to believe, but Turbo C came out in 1987 and was pretty primitive. I seem to remember the early version of Turbo C would just hard stop on the first syntax error. Fun times.

Borland introduced syntax highlight on Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, if memory serves me right, while all their products for OS/2 and Windows 3.x provided it from the start.

Autocomplete came around Borland C++ 4.0 timeframe, or something like that.

I don't think we knew what we were missing though. I just remember how fast it was and being amazed that it came with four inches of printed documentation.

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