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I get your point, but VSCode does far more than text editing. The line between an advanced editor and an IDE gets blurry. If you look at the Wikipedia page abou

I get your point, but VSCode does far more than text editing. The line between an advanced editor and an IDE gets blurry. If you look at the Wikipedia page about IDEs[1] you see that VSCode ticks off more boxes than not. It has integration with source code control, refactoring, a debugger, etc. With the right combination of extensions it gets really close to an IDE as strictly defined. These days advanced text editor vs. "real" IDE seems more like a distinction without much of a difference. You may feel 99% certain, but you got it wrong. I have quite a bit of experience with IDEs, you shouldn't assume I use vim out of ignorance. I have worked as a programmer for 40+ years, with development tools (integrated or not) that I have forgotten the names of. That includes "real" IDEs like Visual Studio, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Symantec Think C, MPW, Oracle SQL Developer, Turbo Pascal, XCode, etc. and so on. When I started programming every mainframe and minicomputer came with an IDE for the platform. Unix came along with the tools broken out after I had worked for several years. In high school I learned programming on an HP-2000 BASIC minicomputer -- an IDE. So I have spent more than "a couple of months in real IDEs" and I still use vim day to day. If I went back to C++ or C# for Windows I would use Visual Studio, but I don't do that anymore. For the kind of work I do now vim + ctags + ripgrep (and awk, sed, bash, etc.) get my work done. At my very first real job I used PWB/Unix[2] -- PWB means Programmer's Work Bench -- an IDE of sorts. I still use the same tools (on Linux) because they work and I can always count on finding a large subset of them on any server I have to work with. I don't dislike or mean to crap on IDEs. I have used my share of IDEs and would again if the work called for that. I get what I need from the tools I've chosen, other people make different choices, no perfect language, editor, IDE, what have you exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

mgsouth 2y ago
What IDE existed for the HP 2000? (Where I learned, too. In Portland :)
- gregjor 2y ago
  Me too -- in Portland, Cleveland HS, mid-70s. The HP 2000 [1] had a timeshared BASIC system that the school district made available to schools, over ASR-33 teletypes with dial-up modems. The BASIC system could edit, run (translate to byte code and execute), manage files. No version control or debuggers back then. The HP 2000 had another layer of of the operating system accessible to administrators (the A000 account if I remember right) but it was the same timeshared BASIC system with some additional commands for managing user accounts and files. No one familiar with modern IDEs would recognize the HP 2000 BASIC system as an IDE, but it was self-contained and fully integrated around writing BASIC programs. HP also offered FORTRAN for it but not under the timeshared BASIC system. A friend wrote an assembler (in BASIC!) and taking advantage of a glitch in the bytecode interpreter we could load and run programs written in assembly language. After high school I got a job as night computer operator with the Multnomah County ESD (school district) so I had admin access to the HP 2000, and their two HP 3000 systems, and an IBM computer they used for crunching class registrations. Good times. Someone had an emulator online for a while, accessible over telnet, but I can't find it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC
  - kragen 2y ago
    i think it's very reasonable to describe time-shared basic systems like that as ides. the paradigmatic example of an 'ide' is probably turbo pascal 1.0, and of the features that separated turbo pascal from 'unintegrated' editor/compiler/assembler/linker/debugger setups, i think the dartmouth timesharing system falls mostly on the 'ide' side of the line. you could stop your program at any point and inspect its variables, change them, evaluate expressions, change the source code, and continue execution. runtime errors would also pop you into the interactive basic prompt where you could do all those things. i believe the hp 2000 timesharing basic had all these features, too
    - gregjor 2y ago
      At the time, in the context of other software development environments (like submitting decks of punch cards) the HP 2000 timeshared BASIC environment would count as an IDE. Compared to Turbo Pascal or any modern IDE it falls short. HP TSB did not have a REPL. If your program crashed or stopped you could not examine variables from the terminal. You could not peek or poke memory locations as you could with microcomputer BASICs (which didn't support multiple users, so didn't have the security concern). You had to insert PRINT statements to debug the code. TSB BASIC didn't have compile/link steps, it tokenized the code as you entered the lines, and the interpreter amounted to a big switch statements on the tokens. P. J Brown's book Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters (1981) describes how TSB works. Eventually I got the source code to TSB (written in assembler) and figured it out for myself. Other BASIC implementations that popped up around the same time had richer feature sets. In my senior year at high school I got (unauthorized) access to a couple of Unix systems in Portland, ordered the Bell Labs Technical Journal issues that described Unix and C, and taught myself from those. I didn't get paid to work on a Unix system until several years later (detours into RSTS-11, TOPS-20, VMS, Microdata, Pr1me, others) but I caught the Unix and C bugs young and I still work with those tools every day. Some programmer friends and more than a few colleagues over the years have made fun of my continued use of what they call obsolete and arcane tools. I don't mind, I have never felt like I did less or sloppier work than my co-workers, and my freelance customers don't care what I use as long as I can solve their problems. Most of the work in programming doesn't happen at the keyboard anyway. I do pay attention and experiment with all kinds of tools but I usually end up going back to the Unix tools I have long familiarity with. That said I did spend many years in Visual Studio, MPW, CodeWarrior, and MPW writing C and C++ code, and I do think those tools (well, maybe not MPW) offered a lot of benefits over coding with vim and grep, for the projects I did back then. Maybe ironically I use an iPad Pro, I don't have a desktop or laptop anymore. So I have the most modern hardware and a touch-based (soon) AI-assisted operating system that runs a terminal emulator during my work time.

mgsouth 2y ago

What IDE existed for the HP 2000? (Where I learned, too. In Portland :)

gregjor 2y ago
Me too -- in Portland, Cleveland HS, mid-70s. The HP 2000 [1] had a timeshared BASIC system that the school district made available to schools, over ASR-33 teletypes with dial-up modems. The BASIC system could edit, run (translate to byte code and execute), manage files. No version control or debuggers back then. The HP 2000 had another layer of of the operating system accessible to administrators (the A000 account if I remember right) but it was the same timeshared BASIC system with some additional commands for managing user accounts and files. No one familiar with modern IDEs would recognize the HP 2000 BASIC system as an IDE, but it was self-contained and fully integrated around writing BASIC programs. HP also offered FORTRAN for it but not under the timeshared BASIC system. A friend wrote an assembler (in BASIC!) and taking advantage of a glitch in the bytecode interpreter we could load and run programs written in assembly language. After high school I got a job as night computer operator with the Multnomah County ESD (school district) so I had admin access to the HP 2000, and their two HP 3000 systems, and an IBM computer they used for crunching class registrations. Good times. Someone had an emulator online for a while, accessible over telnet, but I can't find it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC
- kragen 2y ago
  i think it's very reasonable to describe time-shared basic systems like that as ides. the paradigmatic example of an 'ide' is probably turbo pascal 1.0, and of the features that separated turbo pascal from 'unintegrated' editor/compiler/assembler/linker/debugger setups, i think the dartmouth timesharing system falls mostly on the 'ide' side of the line. you could stop your program at any point and inspect its variables, change them, evaluate expressions, change the source code, and continue execution. runtime errors would also pop you into the interactive basic prompt where you could do all those things. i believe the hp 2000 timesharing basic had all these features, too
  - gregjor 2y ago
    At the time, in the context of other software development environments (like submitting decks of punch cards) the HP 2000 timeshared BASIC environment would count as an IDE. Compared to Turbo Pascal or any modern IDE it falls short. HP TSB did not have a REPL. If your program crashed or stopped you could not examine variables from the terminal. You could not peek or poke memory locations as you could with microcomputer BASICs (which didn't support multiple users, so didn't have the security concern). You had to insert PRINT statements to debug the code. TSB BASIC didn't have compile/link steps, it tokenized the code as you entered the lines, and the interpreter amounted to a big switch statements on the tokens. P. J Brown's book Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters (1981) describes how TSB works. Eventually I got the source code to TSB (written in assembler) and figured it out for myself. Other BASIC implementations that popped up around the same time had richer feature sets. In my senior year at high school I got (unauthorized) access to a couple of Unix systems in Portland, ordered the Bell Labs Technical Journal issues that described Unix and C, and taught myself from those. I didn't get paid to work on a Unix system until several years later (detours into RSTS-11, TOPS-20, VMS, Microdata, Pr1me, others) but I caught the Unix and C bugs young and I still work with those tools every day. Some programmer friends and more than a few colleagues over the years have made fun of my continued use of what they call obsolete and arcane tools. I don't mind, I have never felt like I did less or sloppier work than my co-workers, and my freelance customers don't care what I use as long as I can solve their problems. Most of the work in programming doesn't happen at the keyboard anyway. I do pay attention and experiment with all kinds of tools but I usually end up going back to the Unix tools I have long familiarity with. That said I did spend many years in Visual Studio, MPW, CodeWarrior, and MPW writing C and C++ code, and I do think those tools (well, maybe not MPW) offered a lot of benefits over coding with vim and grep, for the projects I did back then. Maybe ironically I use an iPad Pro, I don't have a desktop or laptop anymore. So I have the most modern hardware and a touch-based (soon) AI-assisted operating system that runs a terminal emulator during my work time.