Brain dump, February 2023 – Dmitry Brant
Summary
Recently I played around with Microsoft QuickC for Windows 3.1, which was a C development environment (IDE) targeted at individual developers, and had a rather modest set of features compared to enterprise-caliber IDEs of the era. Even though it still has the familiar issues of native Windows programming — many screenfuls of boilerplate code and having to manually handle message loops and drawing subroutines — after this was out of the way, the sailing was smooth. Still, it’s only very recently that Gradle has gotten fast enough to finish building a Hello World app in under a minute. I won’t even get into the sizes, now measured in gigabytes, that modern IDEs require to make themselves at home on our workstations, whereas the entirety of QuickC was able to fit on three floppy disks. Is this kind of level of efficiency and streamlining squarely in the distant past of software tools, or can we in the present day take steps to get back to that spirit?
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