This is really neat, I'll have to give it a try. I grew up on QuickBASIC, then Turbo Pascal and Turbo C later on. For my own personal hands on coding time solving mathematical challengers or working on hand coded personal projects to relax in our increasingly agent driven world I've taken to using the text mode Free Pascal ide that is bundled in with the fpc compiler, built on an open-source implementation of Borland's TurboVision DOS TUI libraries. I always wished it had a mode to emulate Turbo C as well.

The only bummer I'm seeing with fcc is not having a linker mean not being able to use external libraries. So you're really limited to what you can include in your own project, but if it truly is C89 compliant there are plenty of useful single header libraries you could use for various things.

I'll check it out!

The Adafruit post is just an LLM recap of the author's blog post, which is an LLM summary of the project, which was vibe coded with Claude. The signal:noise ratio is dropping off exponentially.

Why is everyone calling LLM generated code "written from scratch" with almost no clue that they didn't write one line of code themselves? Yeah, it was written from scratch, but not by you!!

Projects like these are defiling the programmer's guild.

Neat, but I would keep an eye on the trend: with all this AI coding (if true) some are now going directly to assembly.

> The result of the study is only a description of how the IDE looks and behaves: which menus exist and in what order, which options each dialog holds, how the Message window tracks errors, and what the diagnostics say.

LLM-generated blogpost. The stench is all over it.