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Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

I was expecting the author to mention Smalltalk because I distinctly remember people praising Smalltalk for its IDE but I think the IDE I was thinking of is from the late 90s or early 00s.

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I think it's fair to say Smalltalk(s) have had in many aspects the most advanced IDE in existence at every moment since its introduction.

Demos for a couple old versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w Demo for Pharo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baxtyeFVn3w

Not only Smalltalk, all Xerox PARC Workstations

Interlisp-D, Mesa (XDE) and Mesa/Cedar, all shared same ideas with Smalltalk, regarding developer tooling.

Same on Genera with Lisp Machines.

An interesting continuation of that evolutionary line is the Open Dylan IDE: https://opendylan.org/history/apple-dylan/screenshots/index....; the deconstruction of the object browser / Miller columns seems interesting even as a general UI concept.

> I think the IDE I was thinking of is from the late 90s or early 00s.

Smalltalk's from the 70s and 80s, and almost certainly had what you're thinking about given it's where both Microsoft and Apple got their foundational ideas (restricted to significantly less powerful hardware), and later unrelated smalltalks retained a lot of now quirky considerations and behaviours. Self inherited a lot of those and is from the late 80s.

So yes, I was also expecting the author to talk about Smalltalk.

If you actually look at Xerox’s hardware, it’s quite a stretch to call Lisa or Macintosh “less powerful.” It’s kind of amazing what Xerox was able to accomplish on such underpowered systems; they did it largely by having multitasking microcode to handle performance-sensitive I/O, and implementing BitBlt there too.

I suspect there are quite a few more niche languages/interfaces that the author didn’t consider when it comes to GUI IDEs. I thought of EiffelStudio immediately, myself, having worked with a group that used it in a past life.

I don't think SmallTalk ever had a TUI. Even the very early versions on the Xerox machines used a GUI, and that GUI persisted even when it was all ported to Solaris.

Oberon was this weird mix where you had a proper GUI on thr screen but it would basically only show text. You could run commands by selecting text from inside any arbitrary window. The plan9 OS and Acme editor have kept this workflow.

Digitalk had Smalltalk TUI for DOS named Methods. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ET8sPbsXQAAcgpb?format=jpg&name=...

The title of the article doesn't mention TUIs (or UIs at all) but I was thinking of a GUI. Specifically it seems I was likely thinking of Pharo (which is '00s not '90s so off by a decade).

The article subtitle is: "A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's".

The second paragraph says: "This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry."

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