My First Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

I have always been extremely impressed with engineers that implement and maintain compilers and system software. I know it’s bad practice, but I seem to tend to try to preoptimize, and compiler optimizations are always interesting. I am especially thankful for the productivity and performance optimizations in Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). For some reason, I do useless things like https://community.sitecore.net/technical_blogs/b/sitecorejohn_blog/posts/custom-quot-editors-quot-render-intermediary-language-il-in-the-sitecore-asp-net-cms .

Commodore did not have an IDE, nor did the TRS-80s (I have a Radio Shack shirt and still feel very sad about the bankruptcy) that I could access by 8th grade. In college, I don't remember an IDE for VAX assembler (Macro). It seems like it was in high school but maybe I was in college when I purchased Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM - I seem to remember version 6?). Update: it must have been in college; I never had money as a child and I remember I got the student discount from the campus bookstore. I also bought Borland Turbo C++, which was amazing. With these tools, it felt like you could almost touch the "bare metal" in the processor.

One reason that these environments were so fast was that they ran in text mode. I know that I was in college when I had a box for Microsoft Visual J++, which had a GUI that provided some advantages over text mode. Update: something in the comments reminded me that I once tried Visual Basic 3 as well (the IDE was decent but...). It was on the machines in the campus computer labs, along with Winsock and Mosaic... Which further reminds me of dialing in to the campus with a 300 baud modem on a black-and-white-laptop to use gopher, pine, and lynx.

In my first job after school, I mainly used Solaris and Silicon Graphics machines. Somehow I learned vi, the "visual interface" editor that replaced ed, the...line editor. I didn't do much compiling of the C++, mostly SQL, perl, shell scripting, and some proprietary EDI stuff. I thought I worked with a product named RMS OmniTrans that may have had some kind of UI but not a real IDE.

I did not like whatever IBM Java IDE I used in the early 2000s, mainly due to performance (possibly implemented in Java). But I also didn't like Java. For Java, I purchased JetBrains IntelliJ IDEa.

Now I use Microsoft Visual Studio Community (because it's free) almost exclusively. It’s great, but for many things I prefer JetBrains Rider. It really helps to have a diassembler (obsolete, but... https://sitecorejohn.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/reflecting-on-sitecore/) like JetBrains dotPeek (which actually is free) built into the IDE, but Rider has numerous other features to enjoy. For .NET, decompilation must be part of the IDE. Maybe I haven't figured something out in Visual Studio (though I rarely need to debug to that level, and know how to download source or even decompile assemblies into my own projects). I also like how console output appears in the IDE rather than a separate window. Again, maybe just some setting in Visual Studio that I should find. Unfortunately, Visual Studio is free and JetBrains won’t give me a free copy of Rider, so I probably won’t make the time to learn its UI and keyboard shortcuts.

Of these, I probably miss Turbo C++ the most. There is just never enough time.

Update: apparently, I never throw anything away, like my grandfather.