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In the early days, there was no such thing as an editor. Punch cards were used for every separate line of code. And along came editors. I had no familiarity
by rcgorton 6y ago
In the early days, there was no such thing as an editor. Punch cards were used for every separate line of code. And along came editors. I had no familiarity with mainframe editors, but DEC systems had EDT/TPU (and another macro scripting thing I forget the name of). Enter 1980s with UNIX. This gave us ed/ex/vi/emacs. I entered the workforce in 1985, and had to edit files on a 1MB memory 68010 system. Emacs was such a memory hog that it would not run on said UNIX system. Fast-forward 15ish years: I have watched seasoned developers spend 2x-3x the time to perform simple editing actions in emacs than it takes to do in vi. Personally, I now have muscle memory for vi/vim, but if I need to edit a binary file, emacs or a hexeditor is the only way to go. IDEs add another level of context & capabilities to editors, as they typically understand the syntax of the language in question and often offer hints.