A lot of these functions where already available a decade ago. The development environment for ActionScript 3 + Flex + Adobe Air was fairly good, and there was also a lot of tooling around live previews and going from a design to code and the other way around available.
It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.
I was around doing AS3 / Flex / Air in 2006-2007 era and agree, I can’t help but also feel what’s old is new again.
If I were to make a guess, IDEs are coming back into favor for a couple reasons (the balance of how much each contributes being debatable):
- VSCode, and to a lesser extent the Jetbrains suite of IDEs, are showing that you can have an IDE and it still be reasonably fast. That’s in stark difference to the old Eclipse days as one example.
- Developer machines continue to get faster and have more RAM, yet most of the dev tools ecosystem seems to poorly take advantage of that. Compare the memory and processor usage of Slack (which arguable has a simpler task) with VSCode, which both use the same underlying platform (Electron). By so many apps setting such a low bar, it further enhances the view that VSCode is fast.
- our codebases continue to grow in size, have yet more dependencies, and yet more moving parts. Things like code completion / doc bubbles / etc are becoming more important as there’s just to much bloat for an average developer to keep in their “active memory”
- similar to the above point, our languages keep evolving constantly adding new things, making it harder to stay on top of all the new functionality, but the modern breed of IDEs can help there in a number of ways.
- we have a had a big wave of new developers start working over the past 15 years and some of them had NIH for things from the past, and now has reinvented what existed before, in someways better, in some ways worse.
I can think of more possible factors, but this is an already long post and I’m sure the ones I posted already will get debated as is.
I think IDEs and REPLs never went out of style. They just got forgotten about for awhile while the cycle between making updates to code and seeing the results was super fast. There's no need for live components on a simple non-webpacked JS/HTML/CSS webpage. You just reload the page, or have the page reload automatically every second.
Now that Node and Webpack take absolutely forever (relatively speaking) to get your JS2020/React/Redux/Bootstrap/SCSS app recompiled after a modification, being able to write the correct thing once and not have to wait a minute to have confidence in it is hugely valuable. Get the REPL time down to a second, and IDEs aren't terribly valuable anymore.
I didn’t want to offend anyone in any particular ecosystem, but when I talked about bloat in codebases, that is definitively one of several I had in mind.
It seems this kind of tooling had gone out of favor over the years, in exchange for only using code. It seems like there are some cycles in which people rethink how much a visual preview is worth to them.