Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1stop | Hacker News Reader

Is this the quality of comment on this website... please delete your account!

What were the "plenty of API services" 15 years ago. I don't remember that many, you are talking pre google days... Like flashing "Under construction" websites... If there were APIs i think they were probably an accident ;)

Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago, and No body cared.. Python was primarily used as a CGI layer, and then later in Zope... Ruby just wasn't used (as far as I recall). After Rails, and Django, people started paying attention, and then google gobbling up the python community worldwide changed that.

What were the Blogging/E-commerce tools around in the 90s? Do they compare at all with the ease of use/scale of those quoted?

View on HN

The e-commerce shop sold to yahoo in 1998 by pg. The guy who made this website. [0] Ebay was also doing lots of business in the 90s.

Paypal was founded in 1998, and it wasn't the first e-commerce company by far. [1]

Perl, php, TCL via AOL and yes python were definitely used for much of the web. Google founded in 1998 used a little old language called... python. [2]

mod_python was released in 2000, which came after the non-cgi version of python the Netscape Enterprise server... which also used JavaScript as a server language. [3] However, lots of people were using perl for web services.

SOAP designed in 1998 was one of the libraries or protocols where people published APIs, along with Corba, and xmlrpc amongst others. [4]

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_python

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP

... You still didn't mention a single API.

And yes, python was in complete disuse that only obscure academics used it (Which is what google was founded by). I mentioned in my comment it only gained traction after google and django before then it was niche Zope and CGI. All your citations don't actually refute it, they in fact strengthen it...

So show me an API that existed in 1998... all you showed me was that SOAP was 'designed' in 1998...

Are you really citing "Netscape Enterprise Server" as proof python was in wide usage?

Paul Graham sold a business to yahoo, wasn't it in lisp? Did it have an API? does it actually prove any of the points you made, or is it just a statement about "There was business on the internet" which I never refuted.

You were really scrounging to come up with pretty much nothing, so thanks for further illustrating my point :)

Livejournal was a pretty big blogging center that started in the 90's. (Well '99 so the end I guess) If you look at wikipedia for blogging it seems blogging started in the mid 90's but was probably mostly done on self hosted sites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com