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Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993

Zach Beane

245 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 1 on Lobsters and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2018 to 2022.
  • Presented by David Williams
  • Made by the vendor. The company whose product it covers made or sponsored it.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

11K views12 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureProgramming languagesHistory of computingC++Vim, Emacs and editors

David Williams demonstrates Lucid Energize, a pioneering 1993 database-backed C and C++ development environment built on XEmacs.

David WIlliams demonstrates Lucid's C/C++ programming system. See also dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers point to this demo to show how advanced C++ IDEs and incremental compilation environments were as early as 1993.

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…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 workstations1 (think Ada machines), with IDE capabilities that probably only Lucid C++ had in the 90's 2. 1 link 1 link 2 link to this video…

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Interactive programming is very developer friendly workflow, something that was already possible at Xerox PARC in their Smalltalk, Interlisp-D and Mesa/CEDAR environments. Actually there was an early attempt to provide C++ repls back in the early 90's with Lucid Energize C++, after they pivoted from Lisp Machines and applied their knowledge to C++. link to this video Also the majority of CERN code is written in a mix of Fortran and C++, and not all teams like to use Python. So they rather use something that provides interactivity to research their algorithms and speed at the same time.

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Like Lucid Energize C++ in 1993 ? link to this video Or C++ Builder or C Set++ for OS/2 (might have the name wrong). If it wasn't for tool vendors having switched their focus from C++ to Java and .NET, until LLVM and clang got created showing everyone what was wrong with their approaches, C++ IDEs might have been much more advanced already, in spite of technical issues with language.

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The point being that we have seen the future like Bret puts it, and are to certain extent disappointed that the industry keeps doing left turns. Many C++ users are finally enjoying environments like Clion and incremental compilers, well this was a C++ environment in 1993: link to this video Built on top of Lucid Common Lisp infrastructure, as Lucid pivoted their business to C++. IBM had a similar one, that imported C++ into a database, offering a Smalltalk like development experience for C++, called VisualAge C++ Professional 4.0 link So yeah, we are grey hair dogs disappointed how things evolve.

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It existed, but sadly both were too early for the market. The first one was from Lucid, after pivoting away from Lisp Machines. link Here is a demo on YouTube. link to this video IBM also tried to create a Smalltalk style repository in Visual Age for C++ v4.0, which has quite resource hungry for mid-90's PCs. So we had to wait until the idea of compiler as library to catch on, to get those ideas back.

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Here is how Lucid implemented their C++ knowledge repository for Energize C++. "Foundation for a C++ Programming Environment", chapter 7, Protocols link And how it looked like with their Emacs customization in 1993 on UNIX. link to this video

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It would look like Lucid Energize for C++, here a 1993 sales demo: link to 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 exp…

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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, link to 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.

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> (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: link to this video Incomplete source code: link

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It was already possible in the early 90's. link "Lucid Energize Demo VHS 1993" link to 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.