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Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

> YouTube was (and still largely is) written in Python, way before it was cool and well-known.

I agree with you on just about everything, but python was well-known well before YT. Django was a staple of the early web.

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It's funny to call Django the "early web" when it first came out in 2005. That is really not early at all. Especially when you consider Rails, etc. predates that.

I was an early Python adopter (1995/1996) and could not for the life of me find anybody who would consider letting me use it in 'mainstream' commercial software projects. Then all the sudden about 10 years ago it exploded in popularity big time.

But I'd moved on to working on other things by then, I no longer enjoy writing in Python.

Wow, this sounds like the classic "I was into that band before they popular" indie snob, hah!

Wikipedia says Rails was released in Dec 2005.

Rails was popular before anyone ever heard of Django. Rails jobs were already common when it reached 1.0 at the end of 2005 (In early 2006 a law firm offered me $30 to do rails work as a summer job off campus). Django took another couple years before reaching 1.0, though I did do work for some early adopters (0.95) circa summer 2006.

I think "early web" here refers to the popular technology used between 1995-2005.

I was using python with SCons back when it came out, sí around 2000. I was also surprised at the statement that python wasn’t well known, but I agree that the Java web scene was much more mature. It was, however, very focused on configuration. There was nothing like LAMP getting people up and running in under a minute.

ASP was also a favorite of the early web.

This reminded me of Paul Graham's Python Paradox:

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Seems like Python is now in the camp of Java now given the current trends.

The staples of the early web, in my mind, are html and perl CGI scripts. php might make the cut as early web, but web frameworks, like those in ruby and python, feel to me me much less like the early web, and much more like the web 2.0 days.

Matts Script Archive was mid 90s. Mod perl maybe just squeezes into 'early web', I think /. used it in the late 90s.

Perl wasn't the only CGI in the early days - a large internal web application I encountered as late as 2004 had it's CGIs written in C, running on IRIX

PHP is certainly the newcomer as far as I'm concerned

Like a number of languages, PHP was around for quite a while before it really took off. PHP is probably most associated with "Web 2.0" as it became the model for web interactions in the mid-2000s.

php 3 was the first php as we know it, and that wasn't until 97 - before then it was more like SSI. It didn't really compete with mod perl until zend

The web has been around since the early 90's and Django was first released in 2005...

I feel old now, for me the early web was on Mosaic, shortly after I discovered gopher at uni.

But seriously, the dynamically generated content of the early web was cgi, perl, later some python (as in scripts, not in django)

I would classify early web (1.0) as 1993-2003 (pre-AJAX), and modern web (2.0) as 2004-on (post-AJAX). The biggest change since then has been on the backend -- moving from web frameworks in Python/Ruby to Single Page Applications with Javascript backends.

Django released July 15, 2005

YouTube founded February 14, 2005

Zope fits that role, not Django.

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