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

by OzzyOsbourne on 9/20/11, 8:54 PM with 7 comments

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.

  • by Skywing on 9/20/11, 9:14 PM

    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.

  • by marssaxman on 9/20/11, 9:13 PM

    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.

  • by rabble on 9/20/11, 9:28 PM

    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.

  • by ammmir on 9/20/11, 9:23 PM

    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.

  • by c1sc0 on 9/21/11, 4:23 AM

    Perl for coding, BBEdit for editing, Filemaker / SQL / Oracle for the DB.

  • by jwallaceparker on 9/20/11, 9:03 PM

    We used "Webware for Python" back then. And Java.