in my 25 years of using their tooling and reading their documentation, they've never been more than what just qualifies as borderline acceptable
I booted up VS2019 today for the first time in a while (after waiting 90 minutes for it to install) and it still feels like using a Jetbrains IDE from 15 years ago, and it's still worse than what Borland produced in the 90s
... and it's even slower than IntelliJ IDEA, which just seems amazing as IDEA is written in Java
The documentation is excellent in my experience though. I love it. Visual Studio is really the only Microsoft developer tool I don't like. Even Visual Studio Code is much better.
It as if the tools were built "by IDE users", "for IDE users".
But maybe I didn't stray too far off the beaten path?
The single most heavily used Microsoft dev environment is the Microsoft VBA Editor. It has not had any update in nine years and is virtually unchanged in 22 years since the release of Office 2000, incredibly outdated in terms of usability. It also cannot be replaced by using a text editor like other IDEs can. It is anything but solid.
The paradigm of sending text in and out of pipes is ~20 years older than that.
I think perl was created in the early 90s, correct?
[0] "1987 - Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall's forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall's monitor isn't random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born."
[0] - http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
I understood it as 'shell computing with stdin and stdout streams of characters' instead of structured data coming in and going out.
Even though I prefer administering Linux servers any day over Windows servers, I find myself often missing PowerShell when I use bash. It has some quirks but some of the design decisions are exactly what you'd hope someone would make if they redesigned a command-line shell 40 years later.
I still find it comical that we proudly paste around commands that just wrangle text no differently from what perl programmers did in the 90s, using sed, print, cut, etc, when things like PowerShell moved to piping objects between commands. It just removes a whole class of ambiguity.