A Brief History of My IDEs

“I told you three times not to use K&R style braces! Get with the program, Copilot!”

Based on Sean's list of IDEs/editors he's used or uses, here's mine (I'm excluding actual text editors, because that list would be largely be variants of vi):

• QBasic: I first learned to code in my grade nine typing class - a fellow student showed me how to break out of the Netware env, and into QBasic, showed me a few commands - this was like a light bulb going off in my head, and the start of everything. I made dumb little games, databases, all kinds of stuff. The feeling of being able to make whatever I wanted was astonishing. The next year I took the junior programming class and I knew which way my life was headed.

• Turbo Pascal 6: For my senior CS class in high school. I remember liking it, and using it to write my term project, a roguelike game whose source is long-since lost.

• BlueJ: First year CS. I remember almost nothing about it.

• rhide: A sentimental favourite. The summer I fell for someone, and had a relationship that bloomed and died from May through July, I decided I was going to write another roguelike, this time in C. Conventional wisdom of the time was that C was the real language, the only language, for proper roguelikes, as evidenced by every successful roguelike of that era (nethack, adom, angband, omega, moria, larn). My attempt wasn't successful, but at least I started it. I used rhide on DOS because I had a 486 in my room, and I could work on it all night without disturbing anyone. I wrote a lot of not-very-great C. I was bad at memory management and good at spaghetti code. I have a screenshot of walking through a settlement above a salt mine. The source, sadly, is lost.

• SPIM: A MIPS32 environment used for my computer architecture class.

• Unknown: some environment for VHDL, for my digital logic design class. I know there was an environment for it, but it's so far in the rear view that I've simply forgotten.

• Visual Basic 6: For two summers in university I worked for a prof on a multimedia editor/player for teaching veterinary medicine students. This was my only exposure to the infamous VB, and honestly? For what it was, I liked it. It was of course incredibly Windows-centric, but that was the era. But you could do interesting things very quickly, in a way that I just don't see in mass-market IDEs/languages these days.

• Ebench (now EiffelStudio): My software engineering class was done in Eiffel, of all languages. No, I'm not Swiss. But anyway, this was our IDE. It was slow. It was suffocating. It crashed a lot. Eiffel was constrictive. I wasn't a fan.

• Eclipse: The first time I used Eclipse was in grad school, for writing Java. This was the era when Java was going to rule the world and we'd be slinging WSDLs and generating binding classes and doing RPCs with RMI and it was all going to be perfect and object-oriented and good (whoops). Even then, Eclipse was hopelessly big and shambling and janky.

• Petite Chez Scheme: Used in my graduate studies for my programming language design course. I love Scheme! This was a good little environment, and where I fell in love with Scheme.

• NetBeans: A few projects here and there. What an awful IDE. Eclipse, but make it worse.

• Visual Studio (many, many versions/flavours): My first job out of university was writing C++ and a little C# and this was our environment. I remember one of the lead devs saying, "use the best tools possible on each platform, and on Windows, that's Visual Studio". He wasn't wrong. I still use this regularly, and love it. The debugger is first rate.

• Visual Studio Code: For Python and JSON and most of what I do at my current gig. Honestly, it's not bad. It's fast and generally does the right thing and the plugin ecosystem is amazing. I don't hate it! I hate a lot of things.

Okay, quick bonus Editors I've Used, in approximate chronological order:

• edit (MS-DOS)
• jove
• vi/vim
• Emacs
• pico/nano
• notepad (Windows)
• Notepad++ (Windows)

Most of the time, if I'm doing serious development work outside of an IDE, it'll be either vim or Notepad++.

Extra quicker bonuser Shells I've Used, again in order-ish:

• bash (my first and longest-used, my default for two decades)
• zsh
• tcsh (I decided I was going to be one of those contrarians who don't use bash, or zsh, or...)
• ksh (at work, for AIX)
• fish (my current everyday shell)

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