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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s

I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.

We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20

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Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.

Borland IDEs were definitly better than Notepad.

The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.

Stuck in MS-DOS?

As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.

As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.

Yeah looks like you're right about at least the syntax highlighting and macros, I can't find any reference to Borland doing code completion back then and what I did find was people from much later complaining that it'd take up to 5 seconds to return suggestions, I used it around 4.5 and really don't remember any of those features though. I guess it was almost 30 years ago now though and I was mostly just interested in making the asteroids do weird things.

So replace Notepad with Notepad++ in my previous comments. There are definitely fast editors that do the same thing as Borland editors did back then the ones like VSC do a whole lot more and support a whole lot more.

Besides moving goalposts, Notepad++ still isn't on the same league as Borland's IDEs.

Turbo Pascal 7 did syntax highlighting, as well as source-level debugging. That was on top of nice-to-have features like auto-indenting.

It was a DOS, Turbo Vision application.

In the meanwhile, I know plenty of my friends happily daily driving an iphone 8, a 6 years old device.

The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago

It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.

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