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This is nearly 20 years ago. Were CGI and PHP really up for the tasks of serving up the type of dynamic pages at scale 2 decades ago? The "content" (articles) m

This is nearly 20 years ago. Were CGI and PHP really up for the tasks of serving up the type of dynamic pages at scale 2 decades ago? The "content" (articles) might be largely static but the pages are not, with dynamic ads, weather reports, showtimes etc. Not to mention getting non-technical people to adopt the language easily, transitioning from print publishing workflows. Do you not believe them when they say existing language and solutions weren't working?

scegit 8y ago
I'm not really familiar with how things were ~20 years ago, but I still believe that creating a language to use internally just for this is overkill. Dynamic ads, weather reports ... etc. are not that difficult they could have probably done it in C (maybe a custom somewhat advanced template engine?) with much less effort.
- mooreds 8y ago
  Twenty years ago I would have prototyped the solution in perl as an Apache module and then rewritten the slow hot spots in c. But I don't know what their hardware constraints weredit person => perl
  - a-dub 8y ago
    My guess is that it actually looked a lot like that, except the mod_perl app was actually a homegrown template engine using their homegrown template language which they then called "Context". That was a common pattern back then.
- deleted 8y ago
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- scott_s 8y ago
  I think you are underestimating how novel those things were 20 years ago. The NYT has been ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the sophistication of their webpage for about that long. Perhaps their language helped.
  - scegit 8y ago
    It is pretty cool that they created their own language, but I was not sure if they really needed to do that. I guess it was worth it back then. Looking at their website in 2002[0] it is pretty impressive indeed. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytim...
deleted 8y ago
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scegit 8y ago

I'm not really familiar with how things were ~20 years ago, but I still believe that creating a language to use internally just for this is overkill. Dynamic ads, weather reports ... etc. are not that difficult they could have probably done it in C (maybe a custom somewhat advanced template engine?) with much less effort.

mooreds 8y ago
Twenty years ago I would have prototyped the solution in perl as an Apache module and then rewritten the slow hot spots in c. But I don't know what their hardware constraints weredit person => perl
- a-dub 8y ago
  My guess is that it actually looked a lot like that, except the mod_perl app was actually a homegrown template engine using their homegrown template language which they then called "Context". That was a common pattern back then.
deleted 8y ago
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scott_s 8y ago
I think you are underestimating how novel those things were 20 years ago. The NYT has been ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the sophistication of their webpage for about that long. Perhaps their language helped.
- scegit 8y ago
  It is pretty cool that they created their own language, but I was not sure if they really needed to do that. I guess it was worth it back then. Looking at their website in 2002[0] it is pretty impressive indeed. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytimes.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytim...

deleted 8y ago

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