And here we are, in a generation of people writing blogs that never used VS6. I am now officially old.
I was still using VS6 as late as 2009 btw...also it's from 1998. If you made a list of Microsoft bangers it's in the top 5 with probably windbg, quickbasic and windows 3.11.
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.
Microsoft had some really smart people working on the problem for years and .net was the culmination of the efforts with things like c# and the very interesting f#.
The problem was they finally solved the desktop interoperability problem when it no longer mattered and there wasn't a huge killer app for it.
Properly scoped well designed abstractions can be extremely powerful and also pretty useless.
There's an interesting counterfactual if they had .net ready to go around windows 98 ... I might be on a windows phone right now...
Gold.
Back when I was making videogames I followed a similar philosophy. No warnings (but in an orders-of-magnitude smaller and less complex codebase). Crash on failed asserts, used liberally, in debug builds. Not sure why but it seems that gamedev doesn't do this kind of rigorous engineering in general (or at least it didn't back then -- and admittedly I never worked in a big studio).
I bet the author doesn't know about FTP's ASCII mode, and especially doesn't know that it is the default.
ASCII mode was a nifty feature, but it never should have been the default. Especially when you consider that most text files are small and easy to re-download if you forget, while binary files are often quite large and the damage done by the line ending conversion is close to impossible to repair. Also, if you forget to convert a text file you can trivially do it on the host afterward.
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.
(A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)
So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!
I might be misremembering but I thought it was more of a Doom-style engine with 3d models instead of sprites for the entities, rather than a full 3d engine like Quake.
Default keys in modern IDEs are basically still the vs assignments from the 5/6 era.
It was the closest Microsoft ever came to making their own emacs or vim. vs6 was like 90% of my screen time as a windows dev in the 90s and 2000s
I've been a linux user for 30 years ... I never had the vs6 level of efficiency in linux, still don't. NetBeans was the closest ... yes, NetBeans... (I've given up though, I do things in nvim, tmux and suffer)
Around 1990, the development tools offered by Borland and Microsoft for C and C++ were pretty much equivalent and they both were quite good.
While the Borland languages were like "Turbo-X", the Microsoft languages were like "Quick-X".
The greatest difference between the commercial software available at that time and what exists today is that everything was accompanied by a set of high quality manuals that could teach you anything that one would want to know. Nowadays the quality of technical documentation is usually much worse.
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."
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.
Ugh, instant flashbacks and not the good kind.
Sadly, the product line got worse before VSCode came out. Things are much better now.
I would go on to use Bloodshed Dev-C++ next. Which was also quite great for the time.
The age of performance optimizations was the age of computers as little islands that didn't need to communicate with anybody or anything, and definitely not outside of a homogeneous LAN environment. It was the age of people having just one device, running one OS, with no expectation of data synchronization. Sharing files was, at best, done by sending quarterly_report_v14_approved_by_legal_fixed.doc over email. This is no longer the age we live in.
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.
Elitism
orionblastar•11h ago
ogurechny•3h ago