I am not sure where we are now, was OOP the dark middle age or the industrial revolution? Or will that AI be?
Would be really interested in your opinions!
- Unless you were a larger firm or project, version control was something you never even heard of
- A lot of the internet was still being put together
- Perl was a big deal and a LOT of it was bad e.g. "use strict" was almost never used so you could use variables willy nilly
- The Joel Test was yet to be written (5 years out roughly) and people were scoring low on the test then
- The only exposure to Linux was generally when you were in college unless you were hardcore. Otherwise, everything was windows. E.g. I remember installing Slackware from a CD that came with a giant book and then thinking: "What do I do now?"
- Java was the new hotness and Rutgers (my school) was the first major university to offer it for there 101 (actually RU CS first class was 111 b/c 101 was "business computing").
- There was no Google, Stack Overflow etc. You were lucky if people like Jeremy Zawodny happened to write a blog post about the weird Perl + MySql bug you were running into and/or if your local book store had Databases for Dummies
It really is amazing to me now to see how MASSIVE frameworks for JavaScript come out every year and the whole ecosystem spasms. Perl CGI was the de facto way to write web stuff for almost a decade. In fact LAMP used to mean "Linux Apache Mysql Perl" until php came along and even then giant website were still written in Perl e.g. Amazon, IMDB etc