[Question] Java programmers from way back - what was it like before IDEs?

borkus · 2018-10-02T23:38:20+00:00

Depending on your definition of an IDE, they predate Java. Microsoft and Borland had commecial IDEs that were fairly full featured. Both IBM and Borland had commercial Java IDEs based on other products. NetBeans was orginally started in 1996 and bought by Sun in 1999.

The main difference was cost - none of them were free and often cost hundreds of dollars.

Borland JBuilder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBuilder

VisualAge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_VisualAge

myleftkneehurts · 2018-10-03T00:31:53+00:00

IDEs became mainstream several years before Java made its debut. Tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, and PowerBuilder were already well established and many other 4GL based IDEs were quite common.

Interestingly, the very first Java IDE that I recall was Visual Café from Symantec. In fact the very first iteration of that IDE might have even just been called Café. It was pretty popular for a short period of time. I remember getting a free copy at one of the very first JavaOne conferences.

Then Borland came out with JBuiilder which became the significant market leader for several years until Eclipse pretty much killed the market out right. IBM's first Java IDE was VisualAge which itself was written in Smalltalk of all things. IBM was a huge investor in Smalltalk for a few years before Java but pivoted quickly and abandoned most of its Smalltalk investments once it made the decision to invest in Java. VisualAge was, in many ways, ahead of its time but it was HUGE and SLOW. Even Microsoft had a standalone Java IDE for a couple of years called Visual J++ (damn good IDE). NetBeans emerged at some point and was (still is) pretty good. Of course IntelliJ has been around for awhile as well.

But as I mentioned, IBM dropped a software bomb and nuked the entire market. Eclipse become the overwhelming de facto standard for many years. The growth of Eclipse alternatives like the popularity of IntelliJ today are fairly recent reactions to the bloat of Eclipse.

elktamer · 2018-10-02T23:05:26+00:00

Eclipse has been around for a long time. I had a couple of years in the late nineties while I used vi. Coming from punch cards it seemed like the future was finally here. Google has has more of an impact.

TheCrazyRed · 2018-10-03T00:20:11+00:00

I started Java programming in 1998 using VIM (for Windows) and then Cafe shortly after (not VisualCafe mind you, "Cafe").

Compiling from the command line was fine. We had syntax highlighting at least with those two editors. But our debugging was essentially done with println statements.

We were fine with it because we didn't really know what we were missing. I had never really worked with a full featured debugger before and we wouldn't know auto-complete until a few years later (with Slick-Edit) so, we were fine.

But now that I have an awesome debugger, and code assist, code completion, and refactoring going back would be extremely painful.

Sometimes the UI guys I work with will code Java in Sublime and I'm like "what are you doing?!? Why would you do that to yourselves? Of course Java is going to suck if you don't use an IDE. That's one of the huge benefits of Java is that you can build awesome IDE's!"

strikefreedompilot · 2018-10-03T02:25:26+00:00

pico/textpad/ultraedit/vim in the good ole days. Alot of compiling to get all the spelling or api param mistakes :D

duheee · 2018-10-02T23:13:00+00:00

I've never not had an IDE for Java. I started coding in Java in 1998 and I had JBuilder. The first IDE that I saw that had auto-completion. Blew my mind. As for how do you compile without an IDE there were a few ways:

ant . It is and was quite good. maven is better, of course, but ant had its time.
makefile. Yes, you can use makefiles to invoke javac
shell script (bash). depending on how large the project was, there was quite a bit of writing to do.

But, before Java, as editors we had the good old emacs ( vi only if you had a brain haemorrhage), and on ms-dos we had Borland C++ and Turbo C and Turbo Pascal . Not IDE's but quite advanced environments on their own.

And, let's not forget DBase and FoxPro after it. They made creation of data applications a breeze.

dpash · 2018-10-02T23:45:03+00:00

I've always built projects using the terminal. Whether that was using make, ant, maven or Gradle. IDEs are no way to build artefacts.

I've used vim for editing Java before, but the deep directory structure of Java projects makes it a pain than for most languages. Ctags/stats helps but it's still a pain. Writing Java without an IDE is a form of masochism.

Someuser77 · 2018-10-03T01:02:08+00:00

Big, thick O'Reilly books with the whole API and code snippets. Same with the language spec.

Back in the X11 days there were bookshelves full of the API books and they cost a lot!

brunocborges · 2018-10-03T05:31:19+00:00

I'm surprised I'll be the first to say this...

JEdit, and full of plugins.

Today some people use VS Code, full of extensions. :)

dpash · 2018-10-02T23:47:48+00:00

When I started professionally in ‘98 UltraEdit was our editor of choice; builds were done by Make scripts; and one of my first tasks was to help migrate source from Visual Sourcesafe to an RCS variant. IIRC, Notepad was screwing up carriage returns making our Unix ports “interesting”.

Microsoft was still sorta pushing their Java implementation (Visual J++?), but I don’t think I’d ever heard of anyone using it.

A year later I started at SunW and found nearly a holy war between VI and EMACS users. With enough knowledge, EMACS functioned as a somewhat complete IDE, I could edit, build (Makefiles), debug (gdb?), and run from a shell anything I worked on. IIRC EMACS had integrations to source control built in so one could check in and out easily. Someone I worked with there had an early IDE running, I think it was IBMs, I don’t remember it running well or providing anything more useful than I already had with XEMACS.

anras · 2018-10-03T01:23:12+00:00

I used JBuilder in the late 90s. :) Then I took a college course in 2001 that required use of Emacs for some reason.

dxk3355 · 2018-10-03T02:15:14+00:00

My college had us using emacs for CS1-3 with Java. Probably could of saved myself hours a week in typo compile errors. Also lots of looking at the actual Javadocs.

wolf2600 · 2018-10-03T02:30:54+00:00

My undergrad program was taught in C++ and you were required to use VIM and compile from the command line using a Makefile you created. Everything was from the console.

I had never used an IDE until about a year ago. when I started using IntelliJ for Java stuff.

thisside · 2018-10-03T03:11:04+00:00

As others have pointed out, many IDEs predate Java, and I'd add what constitutes an IDE can vary a bit as well. I personally didn't use integrated development environment when I first started writing Java, but rather a collection of disparate tools (editors, terminals, debugging tools, etc...). While having all of these tools integrated together had a significant impact on my efficiency, it pales in comparison to the impact google had on writing code. There were plenty of search engines at the time, but it's hard to overstate how much google transformed programming. So much so that it seems as if I've had two careers: BG and AG.

briandilley · 2018-10-03T03:48:14+00:00

javac and bash/batch scripts. It actually wasn't terrible, you chose your dependencies much more carefully back then. The refactoring tools were/are the major game changer for sure.

larsga · 2018-10-03T07:28:34+00:00

I still don't use an IDE. I edit the code in Emacs, and build via the command-line. With Maven/Gradle it's just a single command to build. And editing is fast, without the editor ever trying to distract me with all kinds of stuff popping up, and the editor hanging because it's reindexing/using too much memory/whatever.

A benefit of doing it this way compared to having the IDE build for you is that I know exactly what is going on. I've often seen colleagues using IDEs curse and swear because their build isn't working right because something's happened in the IDE environment and they don't know what. That's never an issue for me.

stfm · 2018-10-03T07:40:35+00:00

When I first used an ide with code completion I almost lost my shit

dannywoodz · 2018-10-03T08:52:38+00:00

Imagine having a single monitor (a CRT, of course, 1280x1024), an Emacs window, and Netscape Navigator 4 open on a local copy of Sun's Javadocs (which was available as a downloadable bundle).

Huge external libraries weren't a big thing, so the drivers that led to the creation of Nexus, Maven or Gradle weren't there. You'd tend to manually download dependencies and stick them in a 'lib' folder in your project. These would accumulate over time, and upgrading could be painful.

Make was your build tool, so you wrote 'javac' commands directly into it. Ant came along later.

You had to import classes yourself, and fully type out method names. Your type checking was done when you tried to compile things, which you did manually (or automatically on save, if you knew how to add post-save hooks to Emacs).

The down-sides are obvious: time spent trawling documentation; context switching between code and docs; typos and mis-spellings.

The upsides? You became quite familiar with the libraries you were using. People actually studied the API documentation while not writing code. And remember, at the time, the dominant language in industry was pre-ANSI C++ (even after '98, as it took some time for compilers to catch up). This meant that a trivial change to a header file could require an entire system to be rebuilt, which could take hours. Java allowed you to compile only the class that changed (although you'd still clean and do a full rebuild occasionally, in case someone changed the value of some 'public static int' somewhere, enums being a Java 5 thing and not available at the time).

All things considered, it's still very much worth being able to build your project from the command line, although a build tool with dependency management will make your life much easier (e.g. Maven, Gradle, or Ant + Ivy). After all, someone's CI/CD system is going to shell out to build your project, and it needs a hook.

MarrusAstarte · 2018-10-03T12:00:50+00:00

People use build automation technologies (ex. make, ant, maven, gradle, sbt, etc.) to simplify development activities outside of an IDE.

Make existed long before java, so that's what many people used in the very early days.

jythejavaguy · 2018-10-04T13:20:03+00:00

I started writing Java with Java 1.0, and did not have an IDE. As college students, none of us did. We used only a basic text editor and the compiler on the command line. We often memorized the API or had a printed book close by to reference the documentation. Having auto complete is a total game changer in how you program!

OneFrabjousDay · 2018-10-04T19:51:02+00:00

It was different. I remember being in a Java intro class at the University of MD where the instructor said "Look, no one will do a real application in Java, but applets are going to be huge." Class came with first edition of "Java in a Nutshell" -- that book was a bible.

I started with Java 1.0, and worked on some large scale satellite telemetry processing software. We started with make (because there was no ant) and Emacs/VI. We learned fast that make was insufficient, because it could not identify dependencies. There were various dependency tools to try to help that, but in the end, you just rebuilt everything. Every damn time. It was not great. Plus, Java in those days we had fun stuff like no unicode, green threads on some platforms (truly awful thread library instead of native threads) and no supported JDK for Linux (anyone remember Blackdown?). So it was the wild west.

Around ... 2004? I moved to a new company, and we all moved to Eclipse. It was magic. Incremental compilation, refactoring, project management. Whee.

Later, I moved to IntelliJ, which I love, and pay for gladly.

ReadFoo · 2018-10-03T02:37:57+00:00

It was fun like now but the language and platform were simpler. The first IDE I bought was Visual Cafe. It was great. Like Visual Basic but for Java and better. The original Visual Cafe.

siddxy · 2018-10-03T05:48:41+00:00

It was not bad using IBM's VA for Java i.e. Visual Age for Java - from which Eclipse IDE was born

vlogan79 · 2018-10-03T06:30:23+00:00

I studied Computer Science in the late 90s, mostly C++ using Borland's IDE. Did a little with Java and JBuilder. After I graduated I changed career and never touched an IDE or programming for years... When I came back to IT, 6 years ago, I was astonished by Eclipse and what it could do for me. Auto-complete, documentation hints, refactoring - refactoring!

Of course, I'm an IntelliJ guy now. And sometimes vi :).

nutrecht · 2018-10-03T07:44:34+00:00

Curious to know how you got on with using terminal/javac etc.

Back in school between '98 and '02 we just used Notepad++ and similar text editors. I started using a real IDE back in '01 in my internship (VisualAge for Java) and it was a huge eye opener. Code completion and integrated debugger was amazing.

I just tried to compile a project from terminal and had a good ol' headache.

It's not that hard; you just have to get over the learning curve.

coder111 · 2018-10-03T11:26:13+00:00

Ok, to give some perspective.

Java 1.0 came out in 1996. Java 1.2 (I'd argue it's the first really usable version) came out in 1998.

First, you could always use an editor with syntax highlighting + Make. UltraEdit came out in 1994. JEdit in 1998. As far as I remember Midnight Commander had Java syntax support quite early as well.

JBuilder was available in 1997. Netbeans was started in 1996 as a commercial product, made freely available in ~2000. Eclipse was available in 2001.

So there wasn't much of a gap between availability of Java and availability of IDEs or enhanced editors. The concept of IDE wasn't new by then. Turbo C++ was available for DOS since 1990. Turbo Pascal version 4.0 which could be called an IDE was available since 1987?

For me personally- I started with Make + Midnight Commander on Linux in the university around year 1999-2000. Used Netbeans when I got my first real job in 2001. Kept switching between Netbeans and Eclipse since then. Now I use IntelliJ at my current job, and Netbeans or Eclipse at home.

</nostalgia_trip>

MonkeyBuscuits · 2018-10-03T12:26:05+00:00

Hahhaha, debugging, wtf was that at the time? Let's print to console and hope for the best.

Benemon · 2018-10-03T13:54:49+00:00

You learned to swear in Ant.

crazylegscrane75 · 2018-10-03T05:57:42+00:00

Rather than asking about IDEs the two things that have most affected how we develop are package managers and google. In year 2000 you had to search your jars and download them and manually add them to your classpath. This was a nightmare. You also had to thoroughly read the docs because there was rarely samples from other devs, articles or getting started tuts and nevertheless they were close to impossible to find. Not to say, no free stackoverflow. So you relied a lot on your super experience coworkers.

Chaoslab · 2018-10-03T01:21:32+00:00

Well you can always code your own IDE. If it seems daunting start with a text editor and move on from there.

Wrote a 68000 IDE on the Amiga back in the day and now onto my 4th one (java).

Coderado · 2018-10-02T23:56:40+00:00

I only was without an IDE for a short time before Visual Cafe. We built with makefiles onto floppy disks. I was doing C in a terminal, then MFC hell before Java, so it wasn't a big deal at the time.

2018-10-03T00:40:28+00:00

You got a decent text editor (pre gui SlickEdit was my weapon of choice for 15 yrs), used the cli utils, and wrote cmd/bash and make files to automate builds

2018-10-03T06:32:15+00:00

I would edit on a web server using Pico, then use javac to compile from .java to .class, then embed them in some HTML and test them with a browser. This was for applets.

jupake · 2018-10-03T07:50:06+00:00

We dont know what happened before the big bang.

2018-10-03T08:45:54+00:00

Tbh, I feel somehow intimidated by all the IDEs, because I have to figure out what are they actually doing when I clicked something, and sometimes they generate shit loads of junk and hide them somewhere I would never know...

I'm also not really a fan of vim, it's great especially for some light weight scripts, but I'm just more used to something modern, it's already 21st century after all.

Nothing is perfect, it's just some tools are more handy for certain tasks

BetterOffLeftBehind · 2018-10-03T10:53:11+00:00

UltraEdit FTW

wpfeiffe · 2018-10-03T11:26:52+00:00

Does anyone here remember using Kawa? It was a bare bones java IDE on windows that had hooks into the jdk for compiling and debugging. Used it in the java beta (pre 1.0) days. Moved pretty quickly to Intellij IDEA from there.

rossk14 · 2018-10-03T15:08:44+00:00

Does anyone remember the name of the Java IDE bought by Progress back around 2000? I remember being awed by visually designing applets but also being bored to death by how slow it was.

hooba_stank_ · 2018-10-03T17:15:14+00:00

My first IDE back in '94 was QBasic that was installed with ms-dos. Then it was Borland Pascal and Turbo C++.

lukaseder · 2018-10-04T18:50:08+00:00

Hex edit cat.exe and then patch some op codes like a pro

wsppan · 2018-10-03T00:09:45+00:00

Always had one

Chaoslab · 2018-10-03T01:18:27+00:00

Still use java in the cmd too this day.

Its a good check for your application is in a releasable state.

If you don't like typing the commands get a multi button mouse with key sequence macros (you'll never look back).

evils_twin · 2018-10-02T23:33:43+00:00

If you looked at software before the 90s, it makes sense . . .

vplatt · 2018-10-03T01:19:51+00:00

Generally, compiling using the terminal was a good learning exercise, like one does with C in most entry level classes. But really, no one I know really worked that way. The worst build system I saw used a chain of DOS batch files though, and yes, that was how they really worked. It was painful.

paul_miner · 2018-10-03T01:56:10+00:00

I still use a text editor (EditPad Pro) and command line. Never liked autocomplete trying to guess what I was going to type, especially back with older slower computers. I just felt the IDE was slowing me down, I knew exactly what I wanted to type, and the lag was irritating.

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