Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993

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

Back when C++ was becoming famous, my favourite programming language was Object Pascal, in the form of Turbo Pascal, having been introduced to it via TP 5.5 OOP mini booklet. Shortly thereafter Turbo Pascal 6 was released, and I got into Turbo Vision, followed by Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows 3.1, the year thereafter. I was a big Borland fan, thus when you got the whole stuff it was Object Pascal/C++, naturally C was there just because all C++ vendors started as C vendors. On Windows and OS/2 land, C++ IDEs shared a lot with Smalltalk and Xerox PARC ideas in developer experience, it wasn't the vi + command line + debuggers are for the weak kind of experience. See Energize C++, as Lucid was pivoting away from Common Lisp, with Cadillac what we would call a LSP nowadays, where you could do incrementatl compilation on method level and hot reload "Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993" ▶ this video link Or the Visual Age for C++ version 4, which introduced a database, image like system for doing C++ in workflows similar to Smalltalk. link link Then there is C++ Builder, still going on, even though the way Borland went down spoiled its market mindshare, link You're right altougth C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs there is that point of view, and also a reason why I always had much more fun with C++ across Mac OS, OS/2, Windows, BeOS, and Symbian, with their full stack frameworks and IDE tooling. However with time I moved into managed languages, application languages, where it is enough t

Julia main focus is scientific computing, and they aren't doing that bad, link There have been other interactive environments for C++ that predate ROOT, but they were too resource intensive and the market killed them. Namely, Energize C++, which came out from Lucid as they pivoted away from Lisp Machines, applying the same kind of technology to C++, based on XEmacs. ▶ this video link And the last version of Visual Age for C++, based on the Smalltalk development experience. link link

Yeah, that's more like it. RPG worked a lot to bring sophisticated Lisp to UNIX systems. He worked on bringing a standard OOP system to Lisp (incl. Lisp Machines, where Lucid (and he personally) collaborated with Xerox PARC and Symbolics to develop CLOS as a part of the ANSI Common Lisp standard). Then he tried to develop and market similar technology in the form of a databased-backed incremental C++ development system for UNIX (called Energize). ▶ this video He hoped that the market for C++ environments was larger than the shrinking Lisp market and that C++ developers would want an interactive system with integrated code management in an object store. That did not went well.

Nope, there were plenty of VS plugins like Visual Assist, and the first IDE to offer something like LSP was a C++ one actually, Energize C++. Here is the documentation to cadillac, link , and the respective demo of their XEmacs based environment from 1993. ▶ this video Refactoring is one feature of IDEs, not the whole package. Still, here is your refactoring rubicon in Visual Age for C++ (1999), link

And in languages that try to replace C++, better offer nice IDE tooling as well. link link With VC++ and Unreal catching up with Lucid Energize[0], others will have to up their game. [0] - ▶ this video

It was already possible in the early 90's. link "Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993" ▶ this video VisualAge C++ Version 4.0 link link However they were too resource hungry for the hardware of those days, then Java and .NET took over the spotlight, and until clang/LLVM came into the scene, the industry forgot of what was already possible.

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" link "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" link "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" link "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) link "The Interlisp programming environment" link And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage ▶ this video link

autocompletions have been a feature in IDEs since Visual C++ was introduced, and copied by Java IDEs, and naturally Visual Studio for .NET languages as well. Introspection, graphical code navigation has been a thing in Apple MPW, Borland C++ for Windows, Visual Age for C++ (latter CSet++), C++ Builder, Eclipse, Visual Cafe, Visual Studio Enterprise. Live debugging and recompilation, edit-and-continue in Visual Studio, JVM class reload capabilities and JRebel JVM agents. REPLs, available as standard feature in Java since Java 9, prior to that there were IDE features like Eclipse Scrappages. Visual Basic interactive mode (classical VB), and nowadays F#, C# and VB.NET interactive shells on VS, including send-to-repl capability. Lucid Energize C++ tooling from 1993 already enjoyed some of these features: ▶ this video

> (One could think of an even finer grained approach that would track changes in individual functions or classes and thus recompile even less than a file, but I’m not aware of practical implementations of such an approach in industrial languages, and altogether it doesn’t seem necessary.) Lucid Energize did it: ▶ this video Incomplete source code: link

Rejuvenating that many devs are finally looking into this kind of workflows. For prior work on IDE as database check "Energize/Cadillac & Lucid's Demise", link You can see it in action on this 1993 marketing video from Lucid, ▶ this video IBM also tried the same concept on Visual Age for C++, version 4, which was one of the very last versions of the product. link Both suffered from too heavy hardware requirements for what most companies were willing to pay for, otherwise we could have had Smalltalk like tooling, with incremental compilation and reloading for C++ already during the early 90's.

The video is not bad but as I watched it when it came out I thought that they missed what for me is the most interesting part: how the console/debugger/ui combination is fully hyperlinked: link There are precedents of that though: from what I’ve seen in videos and read in manuals, the integrated LISP environments like Genera did have that much earlier. That was built by teams of people with way more resources than him. I think Terry Davis was right in that some valuable things have been lost in modern computing systems. BTW, today I watched a demonstration of an IDE from the 1990s linked from another HN discussion which also hyperlinked things like the debugger (gdb) output etc.: ▶ this video It was the company that made Lucid Emacs (later XEmacs) which they built for this purpose: graphic elements combined with monospace text.