Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously.
I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC)
And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration tasks... glad I forgot the name of it, to be honest.
The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful.
We lost a lot when that era died.
[[muffled screaming]]
huh. That's not been my experience. To me, it looks like they stopped improving things circa 2005. Things that are new tend to be half-baked (.NET integration, OOP language features). No command line compiler (although you can write one yourself and a java-based community project exists), no linting or other static analysis tools. Their IDE is eclipse-based and frequently crashes when working with GUI for .NET. The autocomplete and in-IDE documentation that it provides is terrible- missing methods, not context aware, etc. They have a docker image, but only for their app-server product. I'm currently building a REST API using their app server product and I keep running into stumbling blocks. I've built similar APIs in PHP and Python and those were (largely) easy- I could focus on the problem and not the tooling. Here, I keep stumbling over things that work differently than anywhere else or that aren't well documented at all.
Their earlier stuff is quite impressive when you judge it by the time. They just seem to have fossilized.
Basically, they're a business apps technology provider, and have been around since 1981, providing app development tools for enterprise scale applications. Progress 4GL was a database-backed application environment, quite widely used (albeit quietly) by big businesses all over the globe to build apps, and has transformed into OpenEdge.
As the Web evolved, Progress seem to have embraced all of it, and - as you say - somehow seem to be using smoke and mirrors to describe what they do - but actually their tooling is pretty awesome. Write an app in OpenEdge, deploy it on any web server. They were doing big relational database stuff on cheaper hardware (PC's, minicomputers) in an era when "big database" meant investing heavily in "IBM" or "Relational Software" (now: Oracle) resources.
Its pretty neat to see them still around. I had a lot of fun with Progress 4GL back in the day, but haven't touched it since mysql/postgresdb was released ..