It doesn't point out the massive productivity boost of Visual C++ 6, IntelliSense (ie, autocomplete). This saved so much time from having to look up documentation.
I worked on that! I was a dev on the team that built the first IntelliSense engine for C++. It’s a miracle it worked at all. It was based on a hacked-up version of the C++ front-end, but when it inevitably hit errors attempting a single-pass parse of the current source, it would silently bull its way through and try not to get too screwed up. Doing that in the presence of templates was not a good time. But with the RAM and processing speeds available then, I’m still kind of shocked it worked at all, 28 years ago.
heh, sorry, but intellisense was the first thing we (in a game studio) turned off immeadiately after install (by deleting the dll as there was no other way) because it was unacceptable resource hog. this was around VS 2003/2005/2008.