Many of those features were already available in MS-DOS and Windows 3.x IDEs from Borland for Turbo Pascal and C++.

Which is why when I got into UNIX development felt like going into the stone age of development tools, thankfully XEmacs was already there.

Which by the way, it was born for Energize C++, in 1993!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

Also here is what NeXTSTEP development environment looked like, used for Quake tooling development, in a 1991 marketing video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Which is why, I usually assert I cannot understand the nostalgia of CLI and TUI, being there at the time, and not being able to use some of these systems, due to the amount of money they required.

You make it sound like he's some young'un, but Fabien has been programming since 1983.

https://fabiensanglard.net/40/

Rational Apex Ada is another dev platform that was way ahead of its time in early to late 90's. Multi-user hosted dev environment with incremental compilation and dependency tracking, syntax and semantic error highlighting, semantic search (i.e function signature) across whole repo, its own version control system with a git submodules style structure, automatic formatting as you write code. [Remote] Debugging and emulation features (stack trace, line of code, disassembly, etc), plus excellent VxWorks integration and tooling. Not to mention all the Ada language features which are still not available in modern languages.

Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure.

I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To this day it is still bad in most stacks.

I used VS6 professionally and for private business around 2000-2004, and it was still going strong then. VC++ was great.

One thing though that I still have nightmares about is Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's idea of a source control system for small teams. It was not only terrible to use (and slow), but we regularly lost data in it due to concurrency issues.

Didn't Smalltalk environments have those features ages ago already?

100% agree. Not only was VC++6 a stand-out product overall, but it was easily the better IDE out of the crop of options at the time.

Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.

It feels now like an alternative timeline, one which performance optimisations were first and foremost still. Sometimes I fantasize, thinking how would our current development ecosystem look like, if we never abandoned the "be very vigilant with all resources you use" approach, that includes the whole webdev liftoff, where we ship a few hundred mb chromium engine for a dock app

Ah yes, VC++6.0

It had such a long lifetime.

The last time I used it in anger to release commercial software was round about the year 2020, at which point the dev environment for that particular piece of software that customers were still paying annual license fees on was a VM machine. The source code repo it linked to had been unknowingly destroyed years earlier, so the VM image was copied around as needed. One had to find the very latest version of that image, because otherwise any changes one made would of course exclude some other recent changes and customers would receive a Frankenversion.

Starting the VM would reveal a desktop with VC++6 already open, and enough supporting evidence to show how to build the software. Make your changes, build, carefully extract the binary to send to the users, freeze the VM again.

I expect it's still there, still being brought back every year for "one last update."

Could be worse. It’s finally gone now but I believe that my employer used VS6 as late as 2025.

VC++6 was the first IDE I ever used: as a kid, I was gifted a CD that had a version of it included. What a great tool to have for the time.

I would go on to use Bloodshed Dev-C++ next. Which was also quite great for the time.

Before the .Net era, there were millions of programmers who were experts in VB. In fact, VB6 was the defacto tool to build desktop apps.

Then Microsoft decided to compete with the new-age rivals: Java and CORBA. So it expanded COM into DCOM and then further into COM+, and eventually released the .Net platform.

Suddenly, those millions of programmers and their built desktop apps were obsolete, as they had to race to understand .Net and learn how to use it to build new apps and replacements for the old VB6 apps.

And somewhere along the way, many of them decided it wasn't worth the struggle (because .Net was a nightmare to install as client apps on Windows machines; even the deployment scripts had becom3 too complex), and they migrated to other tools (Java, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails, PHP, etc.) or to non-programming jobs (usually management).

Thus, within a few years, Microsoft had veritably killed the programming industry it took decades to build and nurture (and yes, Microsoft's decision to turn a blind eye - as its Windows OSes, MS Office and Visual Studio (VB & VC++) tools were pirated across the world, churning out millions of programmers and users familiar with its products as they used the pirated versions at school, college. home and office - that was also a deliberate decision by Microsoft during this halycon era).

But I feel .Net became too big of a beast even for mighty Microsoft to handle. As concerns grew over the performance aspects and innumerable dependencies of the .Net platform and related tools (Azure, SSIS, SSRS, etc.), the world started to shift away from Microsoft's tools, and that's perhaps why Microsoft finally knuckled under and embraced the open-source ecosystem it had openly hated for decades. VSCode, etc., are Microsoft's last-ditch attempts to have some relevancy in the programming industry.