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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> In 2004 we solved the types for JS with ECMAScript 4 (or ActionScript 2.0).

> Unfortunately this was in the middle of browser wars, so no one cared about the standards and all of that work was lost like tears in rain.

> Around that time I attended MS conference where they introduced IntelliSense and it was a forming experience for myself. You could do actual programming basically with <space>, <dot>, arrow keys and <enter>.

I think you’re off by at least 6-7 years. Visual Studio had autocomplete since at least version 6. And yes it was magical the first time you experienced it.

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Aye, you're right.

My father took me to that conference so that would be closer to 2000 or 2001.

Fun fact, around that time I attended 3 "microsoft summit" - that was the name of the event - and every time the absolute banger, booked out months before the event, was a workshop with a guy who specialized in optimizing windows licensing for enterprise.

That was still the time when MS charged per CPU on servers, and the guy used to give couple seemingly basic scenarios and asking crowd how would they deal with licenses. Every time his version was 3-4x cheaper than what you would think of.

And by 2004 the browser wars where long over. That was the period when Microsoft left the web languishing on IE6 after destroying all competitors and then promptly disbanding their browser team. Firefox only got its name in 2004 and was released at the end of that year.

Not at all.

Ever wondered why, even on modern websites, css is riddled with repeated statements with this weird "moz-" prefixes?

In 2006 when working at Wikia I wrote a tiny lib for deep linking.

The lib started at 25 lines with naive implementation of the documentation. Two weeks later when I had all browsers on all operating systems mapped out it was close to 1,000 lines.

I've spent half of my coding time working with Flash, and the monopoly was great. You could make a layout, write a code and have absolute certainty that the outcome will look and feel exactly the same regardless if you ran it on desktop, in the browser - any browser, mobile or kiosk.

Few years later I did UI for The Witcher and Dead Island and with that you can add xbox and playstation to the list.

Last time I did some web programming was 3 years ago, but it was still a far cry from that experience.

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