Post #3398040

2026-06-23 00:17 UTC

@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz agreed. part of The Unix Way, imo, was that any terminal provided a de facto IDE. you just have to learn the various CLI tools and shell patterns and common keystrokes etc. I think the more modern trend of ostensible IDEs made more sense in reaction to what MS Windows and early Mac gave a programmer out of the box. if you can already get what you need they appeal less

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@AmenZwa@mathstodon.xyz 2026-06-23 01:42

@synlogic4242@social.vivaldi.net Of course, it is a bit unfair for us "moderns" to compare UNIX to the likes of NeXTSTEP, Windows, macOS, and such. This comparison came about, because UNIX, starting in the early 1980s, began competing in the PC market, and soon gave birth to the workstation OSs of the time: SunOS, IRIX, Ultrix, AIX, HP/UX, and so on, sporting the X Window System. But despite all those modern accoutrements, UNIX was still very much the 1960s time-sharing OS, not a personal OS. That heritage continues into the modern UNIXen, like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin. Looking upon UNIX in its period-correct context—during the late 1960s and the early 1970s when batch processing on mainframes over the teletype is the fashion of the day—what Thompson and Ritchie achieved in such a short time frame is, frankly, a superhuman achievement. I do not recall the exact phrase, but I once read something like this in a Bell Labs publication: "UNIX was created by programmers for programmers to do programming". In other words, Thompson created UNIX to make his daily programming activities more efficient, effective, and enjoyable. UNIX, therefore, is the world's first IDE. By "IDE", I do not refer to modern, surface-indicia of programming, such as buttons, scroll bars, and menus; I mean a unified, coherent system designed, ab initio, to serve as the ultimate software development environment, integrating all programming-related tools that a programmer would need. In contrast, most popular operating systems (OS/360, VAX/VMS, Windows, macOS, etc.) are designed for non-techie business users.

Open ##3398039