What were those “gaps”? There were decent compilers and IDEs at least in the mid 90s.

MySQL was available for free in 2000 and anyone could download any number of language runtimes for free like Perl and Java. If your corporate overlords weren’t cheap (or you were in college) an MSDN subscription was amazing.

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gkoberger a day ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, things existed. mySQL is a great database, but so is Mongo and so is Clickhouse and so is Firebase, etc. Those alternatives all filled a gap MySQL couldn't, and now the bar for creating a new type of database is significantly higher because there's fewer gaps (schema-less, good for logs, good for fulltext search, realtime, etc).

JavaScript has been around for decades. But jQuery made it so much easier, and then React built on top of that even more. And jQuery wasn't the first DOM library, nor was React the first framework – but both were where it seemingly clicked between ideas, usability and whatever else made them successful.

(I will agree that Microsoft had a run of things where anyone who bought in to their ecosystem had a lot of things that worked well together.)

	▲	raw_anon_1111 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly, the web as an app platform didn’t really take off until 2008. If you were a pure Microsoft shop from top to bottom, all you needed was an MSDN subscription provided by your employer.

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pixl97 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Those IDEs sucked compared to what you can download in 5 minutes for free today. The number of libraries available (and where you could find them) was miniscule, and most had very bad documentation for beginners.

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godelski a day ago | parent | next [-]

People here talking like we've made no progress in the last few decades... which we're that true then that'd also contradict their point and only agree with you... I'm really confused looking at all these replies

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JustExAWS a day ago | parent [-]

The “free IDEs” even today aren’t as good as the paid products by Microsoft and JetBrains.

Especially today while the IDEs are free, people are paying for LLM coding assistants.

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godelski a day ago | parent [-]

Tbh, I'm not sure I agree. I program in vim and the terminal. I get way more benefit out of that than VSCode. Regardless, things have improved dramatically. Hell, Linux is way more user friendly than it was even a decade ago.

	▲	scarface_74 a day ago \| parent [-]
		With Vim and the terminal can I set conditional breakpoints, watches, and back in the day when I did bit twiddling in C, debug stack corruption and look at the assembly that the compiler was creating first each line? With JetBrsins ReSharper using Visual Studio, there are hundreds of guaranteed safe project wide refactoring you can do [1] and a lot of various boiler plate code it can autogenerate. Not to mention the dark days of Window GUI development. How exactly is Vim better than a modern IDE? [1] Yes I know all bets are off when you are using reflection.

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scarface_74 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you ever use the Turbo series IDEs or whatever that IBM Java based IDE was? Visual Studio was quite good in 1999.