"Deploying a commercial website ten years ago required significant upfront capital"
Actually... you could get a very large website up 10 years ago on almost nothing. $30/month dedicated servers were available that could do 10,000 connections at once. Which means you could serve millions of people cheaply. You could also get lots of virtual shared hosts for $5/month or less.
Heck, even 15 years ago you could do that. Maybe not everyone realised it till later, but it's not a new thing at all.
"Startups created simple APIs that abstract away complex back ends. Examples: Stripe (payments), Twilio (communications), Firebase (databases), Sift Science (fraud)."
There were plenty of services around on the internet 15 years ago with APIs too. Including payments, communications, databases, and fraud. I know because I developed some of them.
"Open Source. Open source dominates every level of the software stack, including operating systems (Linux), databases (MySql), web servers (Apache), and programming languages (Python, Ruby). These are not only free but generally also far higher quality than their commercial counterparts."
Guess what? Open source was around 10 years ago.
"Programming languages. Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python. Moore’s Law gave us excess computing resources. We spent it making developers more effective."
Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago. The same as perl, php, and haskell amongst others.
"Special-purpose tools for non-programmers. These tools let non-programmers create software in certain pre-defined categories, thereby lowering costs and reducing the demand for developers. Examples: Shopify (e-commerce), WordPress (blogging), and Weebly (small business websites)."
um... blogging, e-commerce, and lots of other non-programmer tools were around in the 90s.
"General-purpose tools for non-programmers. In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn’t been much work in these areas, but from what I’ve seen that might change soon. By allowing more people to program, these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."
Have you heard of the internet? Seen the reams of cut and paste code out there from semi-technical people? Whole industries are centered around letting less skilled people make software. This hasn't decreased, but increased. There's a whole "everyone should code" movement hitting us.
Is this the quality of article we want on this website? Please delete my account!? I'm done.
His point is not dependent on getting the number of years ago exactly right. Mentally replace "10 years" with 15 or 20 if it helps.
I don't really blame the author for getting it wrong. It's easy to lost track of how many years have passed as one gets older. I can still remember the Internet before the Web, so it can't have been that long ago, right? Right??
The way I remember it is ten years ago was the tail end of an era in which hosting was expensive and bandwidth was even worse and small sites that got a little more popular than expected would regularly go dark at the ends of months because they hit a resource cap.
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?
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]
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.
"Deploying a commercial website ten years ago required significant upfront capital"
Actually... you could get a very large website up 10 years ago on almost nothing. $30/month dedicated servers were available that could do 10,000 connections at once. Which means you could serve millions of people cheaply. You could also get lots of virtual shared hosts for $5/month or less.
Heck, even 15 years ago you could do that. Maybe not everyone realised it till later, but it's not a new thing at all.
"Startups created simple APIs that abstract away complex back ends. Examples: Stripe (payments), Twilio (communications), Firebase (databases), Sift Science (fraud)."
There were plenty of services around on the internet 15 years ago with APIs too. Including payments, communications, databases, and fraud. I know because I developed some of them.
"Open Source. Open source dominates every level of the software stack, including operating systems (Linux), databases (MySql), web servers (Apache), and programming languages (Python, Ruby). These are not only free but generally also far higher quality than their commercial counterparts."
Guess what? Open source was around 10 years ago.
"Programming languages. Developers have steadily marched upwards from Assembly to C to Java to, today, scripting languages like Ruby and Python. Moore’s Law gave us excess computing resources. We spent it making developers more effective."
Ruby and Python were both around ten years ago. The same as perl, php, and haskell amongst others.
"Special-purpose tools for non-programmers. These tools let non-programmers create software in certain pre-defined categories, thereby lowering costs and reducing the demand for developers. Examples: Shopify (e-commerce), WordPress (blogging), and Weebly (small business websites)."
um... blogging, e-commerce, and lots of other non-programmer tools were around in the 90s.
"General-purpose tools for non-programmers. In the pre-Internet era, tools like Hypercard and Visual Basic allowed hundreds of millions of semi-technical people to become software developers. Since then, there hasn’t been much work in these areas, but from what I’ve seen that might change soon. By allowing more people to program, these tools act as a force multiplier for the software industry."
Have you heard of the internet? Seen the reams of cut and paste code out there from semi-technical people? Whole industries are centered around letting less skilled people make software. This hasn't decreased, but increased. There's a whole "everyone should code" movement hitting us.
Is this the quality of article we want on this website? Please delete my account!? I'm done.