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"The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure o

"The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything." I'm going to have to disagree and say 2005 wasn't all that much "wild west" when writing web apps. Maybe it was for them, but not the enterprise world.

keysersosa 10y ago
At the time, in late 2005, we were writing in (I believe) python 2.3 and had rolled our own web framework because it was otherwise normal behavior to hook straight into wscgi. "wild west" might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the available toolkit was certainly pretty bare bones. It was also quite early in web 2.0, and I still remember when we switched up reddit's frontend to start using prototype.js (which had just come out earlier that year). Being able to use the same ajax call in both IE and Firefox! Magic!
rimantas 10y ago
Probably because enterprise was writing the web of 1998 in 2005. Outside it Firefox was gaining traction, web standards movement was in its golden years (IMHO what we have now is a big regression), AJAX was a fresh kid on the block… Fun times.
justinlardinois 10y ago
I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is still Python to this day. I don't think Lisp web apps ever became mainstream, and Python web apps were definitely a wild west back then. The enterprise world was using ASP and Java and Cold Fusion.
- jandrese 10y ago
  It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.
  - lispm 10y ago
    http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html > If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. > We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us. > Regardless of Python, reddit was begging for a rewrite. Whether it was the best decision to do it all at once is up for debate, but I'm very pleased at the way it turned out.
the_watcher 10y ago
Rails didn't exist yet. People were still building from scratch instead of using a framework to get started. It wasn't the "wild west" in that no one was doing it, but it definitely was in terms of ecosystems that had developed around web development frameworks
- anarazel 10y ago
  It was still the time of zope. Mixed feelings.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Rails was available as open-source then, but hadn't officially reached 1.0, and DHH was pretty much the only committer.
dlandis 10y ago
That's true, even outside of the enterprise (J2EE) world, there were some fairly decent (for the time) and mature frameworks like Apache Struts and Apache Tapestry. You even frontend frameworks like Dojo Toolkit available then.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Struts was never decent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wwweston 10y ago
On one hand, I agree. For example, by late 2003 I was already working with PHP codebases that had adopted a roughly MVC paradigm -- routes mapped to controller objects and methods, active-record like database abstractions, and templates separated from anything but display logic -- and had an interesting optimization and caching setup. This all seemed broadly known as a good way to do things by 2005-ish. But on the other hand: I'm not convinced this is the beginning and end of architecture considerations. We've still only been writing web apps for a bit over two decades, it's possible we still have some things to learn about how to organize them and get them to perform well. In particular, problems of scale circa 2005 aren't really the same as current problems of scale. There are just More Users on the web doing more things and we're tracking more data. We have different tools for managing all this. We're still figuring out if we like those tools. And on top of that, we seem to be in the middle of an SPA/browser-as-VM kick that I suspect is going to look at least a little overdone and ill-considered in another five years or so.
- Swizec 10y ago
  Django was released in 2005. That's MVC for python. Ruby on Rails, 2005. That's MVC for ruby. Zend Framework, 2006. That's MVC for PHP. phpBB, 2001. MVC for PHP. But not generalized, specific usecase only. Backbone.js, 2010. That's MVC for JS. Sounds to me like in 2005 the web was pretty wild westy in terms of separating data from views and application logic.
  - niftich 10y ago
    This is good info. In 2005, Ajax all the hype but very new, Prototype just came out. script.aculo.us was the first popular library to add fluid interactivity like drag-and-drop to DOM elements. This is a year before jQuery. On the Java front we had 'Model 2' frameworks like Struts 1. Struts 2 was brand new. Oracle had ADF and pushed it pretty hard. JSF was fairly new and nearly no one used it. ColdFusion offered a complete package and was actually not terrible. MySpace was written in CF. There was always ASP.NET. But if you weren't coding in Java, CF, or ASP, you were using some bespoke not-yet-framework. I'd say 'wild wild west' is an apt description.
  - 10y ago
awqrre 10y ago
it is still the wild west today... no secure apps exist...

keysersosa 10y ago

At the time, in late 2005, we were writing in (I believe) python 2.3 and had rolled our own web framework because it was otherwise normal behavior to hook straight into wscgi. "wild west" might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but the available toolkit was certainly pretty bare bones. It was also quite early in web 2.0, and I still remember when we switched up reddit's frontend to start using prototype.js (which had just come out earlier that year). Being able to use the same ajax call in both IE and Firefox! Magic!

rimantas 10y ago

Probably because enterprise was writing the web of 1998 in 2005. Outside it Firefox was gaining traction, web standards movement was in its golden years (IMHO what we have now is a big regression), AJAX was a fresh kid on the block… Fun times.

justinlardinois 10y ago

I'm not at all familiar with Reddit's history, but a quick Google search tells me it was originally written in Lisp and then was rewritten in Python and is still Python to this day. I don't think Lisp web apps ever became mainstream, and Python web apps were definitely a wild west back then. The enterprise world was using ASP and Java and Cold Fusion.

jandrese 10y ago
It would be interesting to hear why they switched from Lisp to Python. Was it difficulty in finding qualified people when the company started to expand, or did they run into some other issue? Lisp proponents are always telling me how much better software would be if it were all written in Lisp, but it's really hard to find real world examples of it being used in production. It can't just be that most programmers are all just too dumb to understand the beauty of functional programming.
- lispm 10y ago
  http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html > If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. > We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us. > Regardless of Python, reddit was begging for a rewrite. Whether it was the best decision to do it all at once is up for debate, but I'm very pleased at the way it turned out.

the_watcher 10y ago

Rails didn't exist yet. People were still building from scratch instead of using a framework to get started. It wasn't the "wild west" in that no one was doing it, but it definitely was in terms of ecosystems that had developed around web development frameworks

anarazel 10y ago
It was still the time of zope. Mixed feelings.
nostrademons 10y ago
Rails was available as open-source then, but hadn't officially reached 1.0, and DHH was pretty much the only committer.

dlandis 10y ago

That's true, even outside of the enterprise (J2EE) world, there were some fairly decent (for the time) and mature frameworks like Apache Struts and Apache Tapestry. You even frontend frameworks like Dojo Toolkit available then.

brianwawok 10y ago
Struts was never decent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wwweston 10y ago

On one hand, I agree. For example, by late 2003 I was already working with PHP codebases that had adopted a roughly MVC paradigm -- routes mapped to controller objects and methods, active-record like database abstractions, and templates separated from anything but display logic -- and had an interesting optimization and caching setup. This all seemed broadly known as a good way to do things by 2005-ish. But on the other hand: I'm not convinced this is the beginning and end of architecture considerations. We've still only been writing web apps for a bit over two decades, it's possible we still have some things to learn about how to organize them and get them to perform well. In particular, problems of scale circa 2005 aren't really the same as current problems of scale. There are just More Users on the web doing more things and we're tracking more data. We have different tools for managing all this. We're still figuring out if we like those tools. And on top of that, we seem to be in the middle of an SPA/browser-as-VM kick that I suspect is going to look at least a little overdone and ill-considered in another five years or so.

Swizec 10y ago
Django was released in 2005. That's MVC for python. Ruby on Rails, 2005. That's MVC for ruby. Zend Framework, 2006. That's MVC for PHP. phpBB, 2001. MVC for PHP. But not generalized, specific usecase only. Backbone.js, 2010. That's MVC for JS. Sounds to me like in 2005 the web was pretty wild westy in terms of separating data from views and application logic.
- niftich 10y ago
  This is good info. In 2005, Ajax all the hype but very new, Prototype just came out. script.aculo.us was the first popular library to add fluid interactivity like drag-and-drop to DOM elements. This is a year before jQuery. On the Java front we had 'Model 2' frameworks like Struts 1. Struts 2 was brand new. Oracle had ADF and pushed it pretty hard. JSF was fairly new and nearly no one used it. ColdFusion offered a complete package and was actually not terrible. MySpace was written in CF. There was always ASP.NET. But if you weren't coding in Java, CF, or ASP, you were using some bespoke not-yet-framework. I'd say 'wild wild west' is an apt description.
- 10y ago

awqrre 10y ago

it is still the wild west today... no secure apps exist...