Hacker News Reader

Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

It was awful. And it was great.

The awful part was C++. There were only two popular programming languages: C++ and Visual Basic. Debugging memory leaks, and memory corruption due to stray pointers and so on in C++ was a nightmare. Then Java came out and everything became easy.

The great part was everyone had offices or at least cubicles. No "open floor plan" BS. There was no scrum or daily standup. Weekly status report was all that was needed. There was no way to work when you're not at work (no cell phone, no internet), so there was better work-life balance. Things are definitely much worse now in these regards.

All testing was done by QA engineers, so all developers had to do was write code. Code bases were smaller, and it was easier to learn all there is to learn because there was less to learn back then. You released product every 2.5 years, not twice a week as it is now.

View on HN

> There were only two popular programming languages: C++ and Visual Basic.

And COBOL. Vast, vast plurality of the business economy ran on COBOL. We also had mainframe assembler for when speed was required, but COBOL had the advantage of portability to both mainframe and minicomputer. Anything fast on the mini was written in C.

When I started we had a PC to use for general office tasks ( documents, e-mails and such ) and a 3270 or 5250 green-screen terminal for actual work. The desks groaned under the weight and the heat was ferocious. Overhead lockers were jam-packed with code printouts on greenbar and hundreds of useful documents. "Yeah I have that in here somewhere" and Bob would start to burrow into stacks of pages on his desk.

Cubicle walls were covered with faded photocopies of precious application flowcharts and data file definitions.

Updates to insurance regulations would arrive in the post and we were expected to take ownership and get them implemented prior to compliance dates. There was no agile, no user stories, no QA teams, no 360 reviews. Just code, test, release.

You knew who the gurus were because they kept a spare chair in their cubicles for the comfort of visitors.

Good times.

And don't forget Perl. :)

Pretty sure Pascal/Delphi was also popular until the early 2000s...

I remember Turbo Pascal 3.0, the one that generated COM files for MS-DOS (like EXE files, but about 2KB smaller).

I loved that Turbo.com and COM files 30 years ago!

later I started to use Turbo Pascal 5.5 with OO support and a good IDE.

Not only that, but Turbo Pascal was very efficient as a linker too, linking only library code that was actually used in the program, as opposed to Turbo C/C++ that would link the entire library. As a result, "Hello, World" was ~2KB for TP vs. ~15KB for TC. I may not remember the sizes correctly, but the difference was dramatic. Of course, for bigger programs the difference was a bit smaller. And it was fast!

Jeff Duntemann's book on Turbo Pascal is still one of my favorite texts of all time. He combined his enthusiasm for the subject with a deft hand at explaining concepts intuitively.

And of course, there was Peter Norton's Guide to the IBM PC. The bible, back then.

Still popular! Where's all my FreePascal nerds?

> The great part was everyone had offices or at least cubicles. No "open floor plan" BS. There was no scrum or daily standup. Weekly status report was all that was needed. There was no way to work when you're not at work (no cell phone, no internet), so there was better work-life balance. Things are definitely much worse now in these regards.

FWIW I have had all of these at every place I've worked, including my current job. Places like that are out there. If you're unhappy with your current job, there's never been a better time to move.

C++ was different on different operating systems (every compiler rolled his own template instantiation model). Portability was hard work.

And you downloaded the sgi stl.

Moving from C++ to Java in 1998 instantly made me twice as productive, as I was no longer spending half my time managing memory.

Together with starting pair programming in 2004, that is the biggest improvement in my work life.

> There were only two popular programming languages: C++ and Visual Basic.

Not really. Back in 1992 I was doing mostly C and second was perl, with shell scripting thrown in the edges.

I didn't start that long ago but at my first fulltime job I also had my own office. An unthinkable luxury compared to now. Also figuring out requirements on my own was nice. On the other hand I think work was much more isolated, the office was in the middle of nowhere. Also during that time it was still normal that every second project failed or became some sort of internal Vaporware. Functioning Management seemed almost non-existent.

PL/1 on Stratus and RPG on sys/[36|38] and AS/400 checking in! :-D

My first job was in 2010, not that long ago but still long enough to experience offices and no standups... definitely good times

Was Valgrind already a thing?

Valgrind was huge when it became available early in the 21st century, for finding leaks but also because and gave us engineers ammunition to use against management to keep our development systems running on Linux.

There were other profiling tools before then, but they were extremely pricey.

Bit surprised - just found out that Valgrind was first released in Feb 2002. It turns out, i've been using it since it's almost first days, 2002 for sure. Had no idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com