Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993

I also only toyed with Ada. My real work experience with Algol like languages are Turbo Pascal, Delphi and Oberon. Although thanks to my interest into compiler development during my CS degree, I also do have some knowledge of almost all major Wirth influenced languages. Personally, I do prefer some verbosity to lines full of symbols. Ada 2012 is quite good. It is also remarkable that in the 80's Ada 83 as seen as almost impossible to implement and nowadays C++ is way complexer to implement than Ada 2012. Another anecdote, Rational started out in mid-80's as a startup doing Ada workstations[1] (think Ada machines), with IDE capabilities that probably only Lucid C++ had in the 90's [2]. [1] [link] [1] [link] [2] [this video]

It would look like Lucid Energize for C++, here a 1993 sales demo: [this video] Or the version 4 of IBM's Visual Age for C++ Visual Age for C++ was quite impressive, the whole program was serialized into a database, an approach similar to Energize, and you could edit C++ code just like in a Smalltalk environment. Sadly not much of it has survived, so save pages like this while they exist [link] The problem with those two products was that they were ahead of their time, so with their hardware requirements, ended up being a commercial failure. Then for something more down to earth, there is C++ Builder, the only actual C++ RAD tooling, but their market is only deep pocket corporations. Think VB experience, but using C++ instead. [link] Finally there is VC++, which also supports edit-and-continue with incremental compilation and linking, and with C++/CX I thought it could eventually be like C++ Builder but was wrong. Also with the C++/WinRT reboot, the tooling is still playing catch up with C++/CX. However there is also the option to use interpreters like Cling. Then you also have the development experience of Common Lisp, Dylan and Eiffel. All of those have rich IDEs, with interpreter/JIT compilers for development, and then you can also AOT optimize for release builds. Eiffel to this day uses their JIT (oder MELT as they call it) for rapid development, and then relies on a C or C++ compiler for the release builds. Dylan while killed by Apple, had a short commercial life, and you can

Compare Symbolics Genera to a Free Software Common Lisp development environment today (SBCL and SLIME on GNU Emacs). The latter does a lot less and is more bloated. Commercial Common Lisp compilers like Allegro and LispWorks have features and optimizations that Free Software compilers lack (Allegro has really good debugging tools and garbage collection, LispWorks has excellent support for concurrent programming). Intel Fortran compiler and their C++ compiler produce the fastest code. Lucid Energize and IBM VisualAge C++ did incremental compilation and had IDE features not available with Free Software C++ compilers and editors/debuggers. [this video] [link]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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

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.