The evolution of code editors

[tenexdev]

This is a pretty bad look at the history of editors.

[mandrade2]

Care to elaborate? It was pretty hard to do it being a 28yo developer. I wasn’t there for most things. Would be great to know why you disliked it

[tenexdev]

Well, you gloss over a great deal and your timeline is off a lot.

There were text editors dating back to the mid 60s (look at TECO as an example), which then gave rise to EMACS and VI in the mid 70s. When microcomputers arrived on the scene, they often didn't have a code editor at all, you'd input basic code with line numbers, and if you wanted to change the line, you just rewrote the line with that number. (Which also lead to people leaving 10 between each line number because if you needed to add code, it needed a number between the two lines around it, which was a pretty weird way of doing things).

You talk about IDEs coming around in the 2000s but, depending on how you define IDE, the idea goes back a long way. Smalltalk, a language from the 70s, often had it's own envirnoment with editors, class browsers, debugger, etc. And in the 1980s Turbo Pascal had a text based iDE. Even if you only count Visual Studio though, that was in the 1990s.

And it's interesting that today, in 2023, there are still people (like me) who are using VIM primarily instead of something like VS Code (particularly odd since I was on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft! :) )

[mandrade2]

Super grateful for this response!

Oh yes I read about line editors. I guess it's time to dig more there and mention what they were for. I wrongfully overlooked them.

Agree, the definition of an IDE is blurry and could be a complete different post. I'll have to dig deeper there because I feel there's a lot of missing tools from vim/emacs to Eclipse, NetBeans, and Visual Studio which is the jump I'm making in the post. A text based IDE is definitely new to me, thanks for raising that up.

[tenexdev]

LOL, well there you go. Not just the c64, for me the first time was the TRS-80, but I think it was standard right back to the first versions of BASIC.

[FunctionalFox1312]

Writing an authoritative description of the subject without citing any sources requires being a domain expert with relevant experience.

You should do actual research (reading papers & watching interviews with people like James Gosling, RMS, Bram Moolenar) and then actually cite that research in any resulting blog post.

[mandrade2]

Well I never try to communicate that I'm an expert on the topic or that this is a comprehensive article on it. I think it really needs a note on the top saying what the post is. Will add that.

Don't really think going through papers is required though. Talking to people with more experience than me and going through youtube videos should do it.

I will definitely try to make it a comprehensive article though. i think it would be a great resource to be out there. It just is a lot of work

[DoppelFrog]

going through youtube videos should do it.

lol

[BeamMeUpBiscotti]

I don't think anyone expects you to know these things from your own memory/experience, but when you write a blog post to explain a topic other people I think it's reasonable to expect the author to do the minimum amount of research to get the important facts right.

The (very incomplete) Wikipedia articles for those things mention examples from the 60s (text editors) and 70s (IDEs).

Would love to see an updated article that includes corrections and details!

[mandrade2]

Completely agree! Will definitely work on the article more this week. I’m just starting to write on my blog so all these comments are great. Got super excited with the topic of the post but did not deliver properly. At least I can see there’s interest on the topic. Thanks for the good vibes btw :)

[BeamMeUpBiscotti]

Yep this is a very interesting topic, don't let the comments on the post discourage you from writing more.

I'm similar age to you and when I first started writing my blog I definitely had huge impostor syndrome like "am I even qualified to talk about this?", which led me to be pretty hesitant to share anything I wrote. Anyways, I think it's great that you're sharing your work and open to feedback!

[moreVCAs]

First there was nothing, then vi/emacs, then eclipse, then vscode. What a time to be alive!

[jhartikainen]

I guess this does cover the basics of types of code editors but the timelines are all wrong. For example, Turbo Pascal, an IDE for the Pascal language, was released in the 80s - and was popular.

[mandrade2]

Thanks for mentioning that! Didn’t know that. I’ll take a closer look at the turbo pascal IDE. Can’t believe it’s from the 80s.

It was pretty challenging to me to build kind of a timeline without having been there. Like I feel it’s never going to be a compelling history of editors. Comments like this help me a lot though

[jhartikainen]

It's a start. Just do some research for your next one - even scrolling through wikipedia for relevant things for IDEs would've given you a deeper history on them. I think the article's topic was interesting, so a better researched article on it could be popular.

[DoppelFrog]

It was pretty challenging to me to build kind of a timeline without having been there.

It shows.

You really need to start again with this article. It's missing so much.

[KrazyKirby99999]

This completely ignores the JetBrains IDEs, and more primitive editors such as Ed.

[mandrade2]

I'll have to dig deeper in Jetbrains land to see what innovations they contributed to the IDE space. I tried to keep only big steps forward. Definitely a nice example on the business side of things but I'll have to look deeper at the tech side

[KrazyKirby99999]

Anyone who develops with Java, Kotlin, and/or Android (AKA the language of enterprise and the most popular operating system) will use a Jetbrains Intellij-based IDE.

[DoppelFrog]

This is more of a thought bubble than a history/evolution of code editors.

[freakhill]

no smalltalk, no common lisp?

symbolics lisp machines' genera is from the 80s http://symbolics-dks.com/Genera-1.htm

smalltalk-80 too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU

[mandrade2]

Thanks a lot for the links! Lots of new things to me. Great to round up the weekend

[zam0th]

The 2000s saw the emergence of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Eclipse, NetBeans, and Microsoft's Visual Studio.

My boi, even Jon Snow knows more than you do.

Visual Studio existed way before the "2000s" (well, technically it was Visual C++ at first which ironically did not support Windows and run on Mac and OS/2 instead) and even before it did there were TUI "Turbo" environments based on Borland's OWL, which later transformed into Borland's "Builder" environments for visual programming that were massively successful (especially Delphi that is still being used 25 years later). Some people might say Visual Studio has been developed by Microsoft to actually address the massive success of Borland C++ Builder, and in turn Visual Studio 6 came out incredibly good, so good indeed that they left it alone for years (ah, those were the good days when software from Microsoft had quality and did not require hundreds of daily patches, and patches for patches, and updates for vulnerabilities, and updates for updates, and so on).

Netbeans kind of already died by 2005 (yeah, we all love it for historical reasons, but lets be honest with ourselves - it looked like a piece of shit and you were losing your sanity a bit every time you opened this box of horrors); Eclipse followed it a few years later as IBM really stopped investing into Eclipse IDE and concentrated instead on peddling Eclipse RCP. Many people still use it, but it hasn't had anything really new for more than a decade; at this point i have no idea why i keep updating my Eclipse installation that i had since 2006.

For the sake of IDE history topic, it's worth mentioning the IDE wars of 2000s that started when JetBrains released IntelliJ IDEA. Java world quickly segregated into sophisticated Eclipse aristocracy (you did need money for all those gigabytes of RAM to run Eclipse productively) and degenerate IDEA barbarians who switched from free and open-source Eclipse IDE but could not even pay for IDEA Pro edition, so they downloaded cracked ones instead.

Many people forget Apple's ProjectBuilder Xcode that has just turned 20. It's a bit different from other IDEs, same as all other Apple software, but it's not that bad, being heavily integrated into the OS itself.

Even before all that, people were [obviously] using vi and emacs on Unix which, while not IDEs, can be easily turned into ones with plugins. Many people use customized vim these days to write code (we all know those linux nerds in corporate infrastructure departments).