Re:Usability of Old Computers
by lelanthran on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @05:44AM
(#37656824)
I agree broadly that the modern QoL improvements in IDEs are better, but not better enough to make those old methods even close to useless!
Syntax-highlighting - sure, nice to have based on semantic meaning of code, but keyword syntax highlighting works fine +90% of the time when you are reading code.
Semantic search - once again, now it's better than simple grep, but ctags provides 90% of that functionality too (I still use ctags daily in Vim).
Semantic code-completion - nice, but code completion in VS circa 2005 (and other IDEs, like eclipse) were partially semantic as well. They did not autocomplete a `#define` keyword when you typed the '.' after an instance variable, the completion was still limited to only those fields that were relevant to those instance variables. Once again I feel that the partially semantic autocompletion did maybe 90% of what Jetbrains does today.
As far as decompilation/third-party library support goes, in 2005 the languages did not have package management, so not automatically downloading the 3rd party library is not a fault of the IDE - where would it download from?
In those cases, like VS, where you were using the Windows SDK, VS itself knew where to get those libraries from (because they were stored locally), and I have many memories of the VS debugger in 2005 stepping into the Microsoft SDK libraries.
To me, comparing 2005 IDEs as the equivalent of a dumb text editor when they had 90% of what you have now, is an inaccurate comparison.
(Of course, all of the above is just my opinion, so feel free to disregard it with prejudice :-))
Syntax-highlighting - sure, nice to have based on semantic meaning of code, but keyword syntax highlighting works fine +90% of the time when you are reading code.
Semantic search - once again, now it's better than simple grep, but ctags provides 90% of that functionality too (I still use ctags daily in Vim).
Semantic code-completion - nice, but code completion in VS circa 2005 (and other IDEs, like eclipse) were partially semantic as well. They did not autocomplete a `#define` keyword when you typed the '.' after an instance variable, the completion was still limited to only those fields that were relevant to those instance variables. Once again I feel that the partially semantic autocompletion did maybe 90% of what Jetbrains does today.
As far as decompilation/third-party library support goes, in 2005 the languages did not have package management, so not automatically downloading the 3rd party library is not a fault of the IDE - where would it download from?
In those cases, like VS, where you were using the Windows SDK, VS itself knew where to get those libraries from (because they were stored locally), and I have many memories of the VS debugger in 2005 stepping into the Microsoft SDK libraries.
To me, comparing 2005 IDEs as the equivalent of a dumb text editor when they had 90% of what you have now, is an inaccurate comparison.
(Of course, all of the above is just my opinion, so feel free to disregard it with prejudice :-))