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by pacaro 2148 days ago
What gets me is part of the '95 quote about computing in the 70s

"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage"

Such a text editor likely couldn't handle lowercase in English, let alone any other Latin script language, let alone cjkv or bi-di. The bloat in software of 95 and the present day is real, but there is no real effort to make an apples to apples comparison in what our expectations of software are, and it massively weakens the argument

Parallel arguments can clearly be made for compilers etc.
3 comments
userbinator 2148 days ago
http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TinyEditors

A lot of these are less than 8K, none of them can't handle lowercase, and I bet the majority of them will be fine with "high CP437" bytes (so other Latin languages.)

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pacaro 2148 days ago
Of course, but editors written in 1970 (25 years before the Worth quote in question) often couldn't handle lowercase (and neither could early versions of Pascal) often because platform support was limited or missing.

Much of the cability of a modern tiny editor comes from the environment in which it is running, we just expect more from an editor now, and the developer expects more from their operating system.

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joe_the_user 2148 days ago
The main question is what should you do with all that application code space other than make the functionality of your core application richer? (adding Unicode is a perfect example - do that and for English language use, the app might seem identical but it's become much richer).

What use would one million, highly functional, stand-alone 8K programs be? What about a hundred thousand 80K programs?

I'd love wholly new categories of software to just pop up. I think about what those might be. But it seems like actually they appear quite seldom. So what else is there to do but throw code at what people use every day, for marginal improvements in existing functionality.

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pacaro 2148 days ago
Thought provoking questions for sure!

Some of the improvements are marginal, but not all, from a developer perspective moving between editors that support everything from syntax highlighting, intellisense, refactoring etc, to then using an editor that has none of that is quite a shock.

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IncRnd 2148 days ago
That text editor seems to have been enough for Wirth to create the Pascal and Oberon languages. VI came out in 1976. Even today, lots of people use VI or some derivative of it.
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pacaro 2148 days ago
Even then a text editor isn't necessarily a necessity, I've been reading a lot of IBM 1130 code, (for example Guy Steele's LISP, and Chuck Moore's Forth)

There was no text editor. The code for these was entered on punched cards or tape. Somebody typed those cards from sources on paper, maybe on a bunch of K26-5994 forms

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