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0 pointsdakna7y ago0 comments

I started programming with Turbo Pascal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

and as far as I remember I never had to leave the IDE. The step-by-step debugger felt like magic.

0 comments

ethelward7y ago

That's true, Turbo Pascal was awesome. But to stay realist, it was rather an exception than the rule at the time.

wenc7y ago

There was also Turbo C/C++, Turbo Basic, Turbo Prolog.

On the Microsoft side, there as Quick C, Quick Basic, etc.

IDEs were the norm rather than the exception in the 80s and 90s for DOS machines. Writing code on DOS with a plain-text editor was a little unusual, whereas on Unix it was a norm.

repolfx7y ago

Yes. This is one of the reasons that Windows stomped UNIX everywhere outside of big iron servers. Windows developers had access to much more advanced development environments that were very productive compared to vim+c and maybe a buggy C++ compiler if you're lucky, which is what UNIX vendors were offering at the time.

Visual Basic, Delphi, MS Access, Visual FoxPro, Visual Objects, Visual Studio, C++Builder, Macromedia Flash, even obscure stuff like REBOL - all supported very fast iteration on client side business CRUD apps that connected to a database.

It's only in recent times that we lost this and came to believe that buggy bloated text editors implemented in HTML plus a giant pile of pre-processors in which everything is coded by hand and the frameworks are obsoleted every six months is a good developer experience. Compared to what we had in the 90's the level of polish and integration is far, far lower in modern toolchains.

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