At the time, in the context of other software development environments (like submitting decks of punch cards) the HP 2000 timeshared BASIC environment would count as an IDE. Compared to Turbo Pascal or any modern IDE it falls short.
HP TSB did not have a REPL. If your program crashed or stopped you could not examine variables from the terminal. You could not peek or poke memory locations as you could with microcomputer BASICs (which didn't support multiple users, so didn't have the security concern). You had to insert PRINT statements to debug the code. TSB BASIC didn't have compile/link steps, it tokenized the code as you entered the lines, and the interpreter amounted to a big switch statements on the tokens. P. J Brown's book Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters (1981) describes how TSB works. Eventually I got the source code to TSB (written in assembler) and figured it out for myself.
Other BASIC implementations that popped up around the same time had richer feature sets. In my senior year at high school I got (unauthorized) access to a couple of Unix systems in Portland, ordered the Bell Labs Technical Journal issues that described Unix and C, and taught myself from those. I didn't get paid to work on a Unix system until several years later (detours into RSTS-11, TOPS-20, VMS, Microdata, Pr1me, others) but I caught the Unix and C bugs young and I still work with those tools every day.
Some programmer friends and more than a few colleagues over the years have made fun of my continued use of what they call obsolete and arcane tools. I don't mind, I have never felt like I did less or sloppier work than my co-workers, and my freelance customers don't care what I use as long as I can solve their problems. Most of the work in programming doesn't happen at the keyboard anyway. I do pay attention and experiment with all kinds of tools but I usually end up going back to the Unix tools I have long familiarity with. That said I did spend many years in Visual Studio, MPW, CodeWarrior, and MPW writing C and C++ code, and I do think those tools (well, maybe not MPW) offered a lot of benefits over coding with vim and grep, for the projects I did back then.
Maybe ironically I use an iPad Pro, I don't have a desktop or laptop anymore. So I have the most modern hardware and a touch-based (soon) AI-assisted operating system that runs a terminal emulator during my work time.
thank you! i didn't realize that it lacked the features of the microcomputer basics; i have the impression that they were copying the same dartmouth timesharing system that hp was copying, but of course i've never used dtss myself
what kind of obsolete and arcane tools do you use? vim seems to be pretty popular among the youngsters these days. a friend of mine a bit younger than you prefers ex
My usual programming toolbox includes vim, ctags, bash, rg (or grep if I have to), sed, awk, tmux (or screen), git, and usually a CLI for one of MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis. The only vim plugins I like to have: ctrlp (file fuzzy finder) and advanced text motions.
On the iPad I use Blink shell, the Github client, Apple Notes. I always have a paper notebook and pen, my short-term memory gets less reliable every year.
I have noticed a lot of younger people using or at least learning vim and CLI tools, maybe retreating from the complexity of modern software development setups. Maybe just a retro fad, I don’t know.
I also see terminal setups described online that try to reproduce the GUI experience — lots of colors and planes and widgets. Neovim and zellij both look like that to me — a lot of extraneous functionality and visual clutter that mimics VSCode. I prefer a more minimalist environment. I don’t even use syntax coloring.
Everyone has to find the tools that work for them, that takes time. I think most programmers figure out at some point in their career that continually experimenting and polishing their tools doesn’t always help get the work done, and when you freelance you get more conscious of billable vs. non-billable time.
i think you're mostly more modern than i am, despite being much older. i generally use grep rather than rg, screen rather than tmux, emacs rather than vim for programming (though i use vim on my phone and for writing email), no redis, no fuzzy find, and no ipad. the only differences in the opposite direction are that i usually use python or perl rather than sed and awk, and i do use syntax coloring—for me, terminal colors were one of the big pluses of moving from sunos 4 to linux
i don't think younger people using vim is a fad, but we'll see. vim to me, especially neovim, seems mostly like emacs in vi clothing
HP TSB did not have a REPL. If your program crashed or stopped you could not examine variables from the terminal. You could not peek or poke memory locations as you could with microcomputer BASICs (which didn't support multiple users, so didn't have the security concern). You had to insert PRINT statements to debug the code. TSB BASIC didn't have compile/link steps, it tokenized the code as you entered the lines, and the interpreter amounted to a big switch statements on the tokens. P. J Brown's book Writing Interactive Compilers and Interpreters (1981) describes how TSB works. Eventually I got the source code to TSB (written in assembler) and figured it out for myself.
Other BASIC implementations that popped up around the same time had richer feature sets. In my senior year at high school I got (unauthorized) access to a couple of Unix systems in Portland, ordered the Bell Labs Technical Journal issues that described Unix and C, and taught myself from those. I didn't get paid to work on a Unix system until several years later (detours into RSTS-11, TOPS-20, VMS, Microdata, Pr1me, others) but I caught the Unix and C bugs young and I still work with those tools every day.
Some programmer friends and more than a few colleagues over the years have made fun of my continued use of what they call obsolete and arcane tools. I don't mind, I have never felt like I did less or sloppier work than my co-workers, and my freelance customers don't care what I use as long as I can solve their problems. Most of the work in programming doesn't happen at the keyboard anyway. I do pay attention and experiment with all kinds of tools but I usually end up going back to the Unix tools I have long familiarity with. That said I did spend many years in Visual Studio, MPW, CodeWarrior, and MPW writing C and C++ code, and I do think those tools (well, maybe not MPW) offered a lot of benefits over coding with vim and grep, for the projects I did back then.
Maybe ironically I use an iPad Pro, I don't have a desktop or laptop anymore. So I have the most modern hardware and a touch-based (soon) AI-assisted operating system that runs a terminal emulator during my work time.