I started programming professionally in the late 1980's (almost a half century ago :-)... and we had IDE's, UI builders, databases, "resource managers", etc. One the UI side, we had to deal with windows, layouts, menus, event loops, controllers, graphs, etc, etc, etc. Pretty much everything you have to deal with today. It was, IMO, just as complicated (if in a somewhat different way).
Yes, most commercial software packages were written in C. They certainly weren't in one file. They were large systems that took hundreds, sometimes thousands of files and 100k's to millions of lines of code. If anything, we had to write more code to do things because pre-packaged libraries weren't as comprehensive back then. I still remember waiting hours and hours for our application to build. And the old timers told us that that was blazingly fast, lol.
I would agree with a previous poster that there are many more choices today. And I guess if you suffer from a fear of making the wrong choice, that is a problem. But the other side of that is that literally thousands and thousands of examples and even robust code libraries are now available for free that you can drop in and use. That is a HUGE plus.
Yes we had those things but my point is that they were optional and not commonly used except in large system projects. We didn't throw all that complexity at people learning the basics.
The interface for beginners scaled all the way down to a very basic single text file, and most beginners would program for months or even years without using those things. It wasn't necessary to teach these tools in school - you could complete an entire degree writing single-file C programs without ever using an IDE.
Many utilities were distributed as a .c file and a Makefile and that's it (before the rise of autoconf)
I agree with most of what you’re saying, but for me, the IDE was waaaaay easier than dealing with a Makefile (yet another programming language that has nothing to do with my goal), or worse, entering random hard-to-remember commands and options on the command line. Even if my program was a single file, it was usually just Cmd-R to build and run. No need to memorize that I needed to add “-l math” if I was doing anything with math functions, or whatever.
Makefiles for basic projects are typically just two to five lines long. It's really different than a large project system, or the absolutely crazy things that autoconf generates.
all:
cc myprogram.c
clean:
rm -f myprogram.o myprogram
They're extremely simple in simple scenarios. It's just a simple format for writing down the commands you run while working.
Yes, most commercial software packages were written in C. They certainly weren't in one file. They were large systems that took hundreds, sometimes thousands of files and 100k's to millions of lines of code. If anything, we had to write more code to do things because pre-packaged libraries weren't as comprehensive back then. I still remember waiting hours and hours for our application to build. And the old timers told us that that was blazingly fast, lol.
I would agree with a previous poster that there are many more choices today. And I guess if you suffer from a fear of making the wrong choice, that is a problem. But the other side of that is that literally thousands and thousands of examples and even robust code libraries are now available for free that you can drop in and use. That is a HUGE plus.