On Mon, 21 Jul 2025 11:19:14 -0400, Christopher Hilton wrote:

>**Q:** How many people on the list are "coders" or programmers?

I've done 'split time' between coding and user support for most of my
40-odd year career. For the most part, I was never really a 'team' software
developer; most of my writing was utilities or libraries for others to use.

I started long enough ago that if you weren't working on CP/M or MS-DOS -
which I often wasn't - the concept of an "IDE" didn't really exist - and if
you _were_ working on CP/M or MS-DOS, any "IDE" was text-based, and locked
to your compiler - usually Turbo Pascal early on, Turbo C or Turbo BASIC
became possibilities later, and then Microsoft eventually caught on and did
their own QuickBASIC, QuickPascal, and QuickC.

Anything else, you were pretty much on your own. Some "programmer's
editors" allowed you to configure them to run a compiler on the currently
loaded file, but syntax highlighting wasn't a Thing - at best, you'd get
automatic indentation, and if you were lucky, you might even be able to
decide whether it was four spaces, eight spaces, or a single tab, per
indent level. If you were _really_ on the ball, you'd configure the
"compile-me" keystroke to actually run something like a port of the UNIX
(this was pre-Linux) 'make' utility, which was a pretty nifty program - you
gave it a list of target files and what files they depended on, and when
you ran the 'make' command, it would check the last-mod date of all the
files, and if any of the target files were last-modded _before_ the
last-mod date of any of its dependencies, 'make' would invoke the
appropriate commands to re-create the target file, invoking compilers
and/or linkers as needed.

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    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
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