I was lucky to see and work with this IDE in a real project, long after it stopped "existing". The company had code written using Visual Age, and it needed to be ported out of it. Wasn't too bad, considering how old it was.

Now I look at VS Code (Disclaimer: I haven't looked at the source code of Electron), and there doesn't seem to be much innovation visually. Most IDEs seem to follow the layout of websites - a left sidebar, a main section, and an optional right sidebar, with a footer.

Note: If someone here builds a different UI for IDEs, I will be an enthusiastic beta tester.

Behind the user interfaces, a lot of things have changed for the better. Integration with other tools in the DevOps pipeline, ability to test quickly, autocomplete tools that understand frameworks, technologies and even contexts - all that has happened behind the scenes.