Re:Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?
by jhayward on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:34PM
(#25566765)
40* years ago I was using an IBM 029 keypunch, and sequencing my cards using an offline sequencer in case I dropped the deck.
Today I use an editor that knows, semantically, the context of everything I type. It suggests nouns, and checks compatibility. It automatically shows me documentation for APIs. It knows several hundred common pitfalls to watch out for and suggests corrections for them. It even auto-formats my code so I don't have to dink around doing that.
We've come a long long way in 40 years.
* Ok, it was actually 1979. We got Vaxes and VT100 terminals with VMS EDIT 4 years later. The state of the art in editing was QED, a souped up version of unix 'ed', and vi hadn't really escaped Berkeley yet. Somewhere in MA and CA, some people were munging TECO to become Emacs.
Today I use an editor that knows, semantically, the context of everything I type. It suggests nouns, and checks compatibility. It automatically shows me documentation for APIs. It knows several hundred common pitfalls to watch out for and suggests corrections for them. It even auto-formats my code so I don't have to dink around doing that.
We've come a long long way in 40 years.
* Ok, it was actually 1979. We got Vaxes and VT100 terminals with VMS EDIT 4 years later. The state of the art in editing was QED, a souped up version of unix 'ed', and vi hadn't really escaped Berkeley yet. Somewhere in MA and CA, some people were munging TECO to become Emacs.