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Ask HN: What were the 'hot' dev environments c. 1999

9 points by OzzyOsbourne ↗ HN
I know that today, almost everyone who reads HN understands when I say 'rails', 'node', 'clojure.' "Hi I'm a textmate wielding rails hacker in the valley...". These are considered the 'hot' technologies that are used today. I want to know what the technologies were pre-bust, in 1999, in the days of pets.com et al.

8 comments

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marssaxman
Perl was everywhere; that was its heyday.

PHP was not yet a joke. Or, rather, it was a joke, but a chuckler rather than the groaner it has become.

In 1999, if you said you were a software developer, that meant you wrote programs for people to use on their computers. If you wrote software that ran on servers, that was sort of unusual, so you would describe yourself as a "server-side developer" or something of that sort.

If all you did was make web pages, well, that was basically just gluing HTML tags together, so you were at best a "web designer". Maybe, just maybe, you could rise up to a sort of limited honorary "developer" status if your work involved a lot of heavy-duty CGI coding. Nobody would have called your tools a "dev environment" back then.

ShawnJG
I would definitely have to agree with you, it was a very segregated landscape. Web was all about HTML and DHTML and writing software for servers was a small niche. In the early 90s the first thing I ever get my hand on was Visual Basic I was young enough introduction. Then there was C++ and Perl and never got into PHP big-time but it was definitely prevalent no matter what your misgivings about it today is.
Skywing
That's back when I was using C++/ASM in Visual Studio 6, IDA Pro, and WinDbg to reverse engineer games like Starcraft and Diablo. Now, I use Python to write relatively simple web code. Have I regressed? haha.

Self-taught beauties such as this: https://github.com/ryancole/broodwar-chat-enhancements/blob/... It's amazing what the thought of having an unfair advantage in an online game can make you want to learn.

ammmir
a lot of cgi scripts (perl 5, php 3). when the perl code was clean enough, we used mod_perl. i remember discovering fastcgi (which i still use) and being blown away by easy persistent db connections and just general performance wins.

on more serious projects, java (servlets, custom middle-tier) was common.

rabble
By 1999 there was a lot of heavy java development on the sever happening. But i'd say the most common server environment was perl. A lot of applications wrote out to static html to handle scale.
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c1sc0
Perl for coding, BBEdit for editing, Filemaker / SQL / Oracle for the DB.