Only without the syntax highlighting. Probably no IDE with features like documentation, syntax hints, etc.
Oh, and testing wasn't a thing. Many many people had no version control, or if there was it was just RCS file checkouts, no branching or merging.
The feather also ran out of RAM if you tried to do two things at once too.
As much as we love to hate on bad old M$, Visual Basic had a rather feature complete IDE for 1991, including syntax highlighting. At minimum by the 5.0 release (1997) it also had function syntax hints and certainly built in documentation. You could even customize the editor window colors.
Of course it had absolutely no code repository or version control capability whatsoever. It was designed with a one dude, one computer, one project paradigm in mind for sure.
Even with SP6 installed, you need to manually patch in scrollwheel support.
Yes, and the form controls included do not support mouse wheel inputs either unless you manually capture the events in your own code using the Windows API. This includes e.g. multiline text boxes in within VBA applications even as late as in Office 2016 which is monumentally irritating.
But VB itself was certainly among the first modern IDEs. It wasn't the first IDE in general, though. I think that was probably Turbo Pascal back in the DOS days which had its editor, compiler, and debugger (such as it was) all in one lump.
I started professional programming with VB3 in 1995. Just in terms of the ability to create Windows applications, it was light years beyond anything else -- even if it didn't even have custom classes at that point. Maybe Delphi was close.
You could get a "hello world" app up and running in like 40 seconds. It's how I got into programming as a kid. In modern frameworks there's a massive bootstrap barrier that beginners don't get through.
I started using VB to create a music composition app that used MIDI functions to generate the notes. This was very easy to do, but when I started writing my own software synthesis routines, Visual Basic was much too slow to be viable. So I started learning C. I thought creating a Windows application in C would be generally just as simple and easy as visual basic but holy shit was that ever wrong. I ended up doing the computationally-intensive stuff in C and compiling it into a DLL that I accessed from a VB front end. Really the best of both worlds.
Constantly switching between Visual Basic and C was quite the mindfuck, though. Thank god C# came along eventually.
There was definitely syntax highlighting in the 90s: https://invisible-island.net/vile/vile.faq.html#clone_colors. Emacs actually introduced it earlier, in 1989.
CVS and Perforce did exist in the 90s for version control, though I certainly can't speak to how frequently they were used. I suspect it was the type of thing used by large corps, but eschewed by smaller shops.
I just showed this to my kids and he believed me lol he said he thought we had to write it and feed the paper to the computer.
That's basically how punch cards worked.
Yeah I was thinking that as I was typing my previous comment. Not too far off!
I just caught the tail end of the punch card world as a kid in the late '70s. You really had to get your shit right the first time.
I traveled to India in the early '90s and encountered a small software shop that had five programmers and one PC. They wrote all their code with pencil and paper and then took turns typing it into the PC and running it. With the exchange rate at 35 Rs to the dollar I'm surprised they could even afford the one PC.
This is how it feels to still use XHTML. I ran my page through w3c and it's like, "Why are you self-closing your br and img tags, you heathen?"
😭😭
In the Nineties, I inherited a massive code base written in FORTRAN. You try to make sense of a system in which all identifiers, whether function names or variables, have to be at most 8 characters. Or bytes, same thing, we didn't have anything but ASCII.
My favorite thing from the past was TurboBasic. Variable names could be any length BUT: the compiler only looked at the first two letters of the variable and wasn't case-sensitive. So variables NAME_COUNT and NauticalDistance were actually the same fucking variable. Good times debugging that kind of shit.
id var prefix
69_index
Yea I was there; and this is unrealistic! We chiseled on stone tablets: paper came out later.
These chiseled tablets were called "punch cards"
dip dip dip
This isn't cobol...
I see let and const. HES A PHONY
Also no if then goto loop.
They’re using react, and specifically, react hooks, which were introduced 7 years ago (or something, don’t look it up, I’m probably right)!
One of many reasons not to look it up 🤢
the difference is the level of freely available instruction. you can go on youtube nowadays and probably a find a guide to augmenting or hacking your preferred mmorpg in whatever language you prefer. you can find a tutorial on anything and everything.
back then if you wanted to learn how to code, you'd have to go to college or buy some dry $50 text called the C++ bible and try and make sense of it. online tutorials existed but mostly to teach the basics.
it's wild to me that zoomers are so stupid when you can learn ANYTHING YOU WANT for free.
You actually gotba laugh out of me for this. Up arrow for you
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