> In a time before Rails and Django and way before Nodejs there were not that many programming languages available to do big backend or web projects. Java and C++ were the obvious choices as those languages were available, being thought in schools and used in the industry.
you forgot perl, where perl plus a handful of database and session management cpan modules were kind of the ruby on rails of the era. (with mod_perl on apache as the application server, of course) perl was huge in infrastructure, but also powered quite a few massive web properties. the tradeoff arguments were interesting... while static analysis was weak, developer productivity seemed to massively overshoot what you'd see in java teams. although long term scaling and maintainability probably did suffer.
> It was also around the same time that Extreme Programming, Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Agile and Scrum were massively adopted in software projects.
i remember being doing a training and the instructor preached all these gospels. i asked them why they weren't used in open source so much and they replied that open source software was okay, but that all the best software was constructed with these fancy philosophies and was hidden inside of companies. that was when i stopped paying attention to this person.
you forgot perl, where perl plus a handful of database and session management cpan modules were kind of the ruby on rails of the era. (with mod_perl on apache as the application server, of course) perl was huge in infrastructure, but also powered quite a few massive web properties. the tradeoff arguments were interesting... while static analysis was weak, developer productivity seemed to massively overshoot what you'd see in java teams. although long term scaling and maintainability probably did suffer.
> It was also around the same time that Extreme Programming, Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, Agile and Scrum were massively adopted in software projects.
i remember being doing a training and the instructor preached all these gospels. i asked them why they weren't used in open source so much and they replied that open source software was okay, but that all the best software was constructed with these fancy philosophies and was hidden inside of companies. that was when i stopped paying attention to this person.