5 ms·

I mean using SCM became the norm in maybe last 10-15 years ? When this was started I don't think using SCM was as ubiquitous as it is today, not to mention on a

I mean using SCM became the norm in maybe last 10-15 years ? When this was started I don't think using SCM was as ubiquitous as it is today, not to mention on a solo project. If you've been hammering away since then I can see how you might have missed it.

dangoor 5y ago
Pretty sure all of my professional work used SCM starting in the mid-90s (CVS). May not have been the norm for solo devs at that point, though.
- reader_mode 5y ago
  https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... I've seen this post brought up as relevant regularly up till 2010. You may have been lucky to avoid the dredges but SW industry in the 2000s was a copy-paste fest (not in the "copy from stack overflow" sense but as in "copy paste instead of creating a function"), PHP with SQL in templates and string concat queries all over the place, MVC was a revolution. I'm not saying this was everywhere just that it was very common. I'm sure some wise guy will come up with retort that MVC was used in the 70s and what not, but my point is a lot of the industry discovered it with Rails and Django. The way that we teach programming these days and languages/tools/frameworks just make some bottom tier mistakes from the past impossible (or very impractical). People often ignore this context when evaluating modern framework
  - coliveira 5y ago
    In the Windows world SCM was not generally available until SVN was released as a File Explorer extension. This was sometime in the 2000s. Git took several years to become viable on Windows.
    - GordonS 5y ago
      IIRC, Microsoft's TFS (Team Foundation Server) also came on the scene in the early 2000's. I first used SVN around that time, before TFS became the standard at Microsoft shops.
      - andrewaylett 5y ago
        My first employer out of university kept their code in Visual Source Safe, Microsoft's first attempt at a VCS. It was really, really bad. My second employer used CVS. Tags were fun back then -- each file was versioned separately so committing multiple files while a tag was in progress might result in only some of your changes making it into the tag. My big innovation there was to add a validation step to our build machine to ensure that the tag matched the state of the branch once the tag had finished, and add the tag to the build version number. Presto: we can actually see which code was built into that day's full build :).
    - kryptiskt 5y ago
      There were plenty of proprietary source control systems around. At my first job in 1998, we used Visual Sourcesafe, later switching to Perforce. At another job I had the misfortune to get to know Rational ClearCase.
      - kevstev 5y ago
        I am absolutely stunned that people think that source control only came around recently in this thread. CVS came out in 1990, RCS... 1982, SCCS... 1972. Visual Source Safe was commonplace in the 1990s, as terrible as it was. There may have been small teams that didn't use SC in the 1990s, but this has absolutely been a basic best practice for decades.
    - atrn 5y ago
      There were others far before Windows. In the 1980s I used Polytron version control system and the MKS port of RCS on MS-DOS.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  The first large project I contributed to was GIMP in the mid-1990s and that was under CVS. I think the oldest personal repositories I have are a little later under Subversion, so yeah, certainly my personal projects in the era where I first used CVS to work on GIMP did not have version control.
foobiekr 5y ago
SCM was commonplace by the mid 1980s at the latest. My CS program used CVS to submit code in the mid 1990s and as a network engineer we used RCS in 1990.
- smcameron 5y ago
  I remember using sccs in the '80s.
ska 5y ago
> I mean using SCM became the norm in maybe last 10-15 years more like 30, at least in a lot of the industry. Even just looking at open-ish systems, people were excited about SVN in what, 2000?, because they had been working with CVS for years, if not a decade or more, at that point.
usefulcat 5y ago
In 26 years I've never worked anywhere that didn't use SCM.

dangoor 5y ago

Pretty sure all of my professional work used SCM starting in the mid-90s (CVS). May not have been the norm for solo devs at that point, though.

reader_mode 5y ago
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... I've seen this post brought up as relevant regularly up till 2010. You may have been lucky to avoid the dredges but SW industry in the 2000s was a copy-paste fest (not in the "copy from stack overflow" sense but as in "copy paste instead of creating a function"), PHP with SQL in templates and string concat queries all over the place, MVC was a revolution. I'm not saying this was everywhere just that it was very common. I'm sure some wise guy will come up with retort that MVC was used in the 70s and what not, but my point is a lot of the industry discovered it with Rails and Django. The way that we teach programming these days and languages/tools/frameworks just make some bottom tier mistakes from the past impossible (or very impractical). People often ignore this context when evaluating modern framework
- coliveira 5y ago
  In the Windows world SCM was not generally available until SVN was released as a File Explorer extension. This was sometime in the 2000s. Git took several years to become viable on Windows.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    IIRC, Microsoft's TFS (Team Foundation Server) also came on the scene in the early 2000's. I first used SVN around that time, before TFS became the standard at Microsoft shops.
    - andrewaylett 5y ago
      My first employer out of university kept their code in Visual Source Safe, Microsoft's first attempt at a VCS. It was really, really bad. My second employer used CVS. Tags were fun back then -- each file was versioned separately so committing multiple files while a tag was in progress might result in only some of your changes making it into the tag. My big innovation there was to add a validation step to our build machine to ensure that the tag matched the state of the branch once the tag had finished, and add the tag to the build version number. Presto: we can actually see which code was built into that day's full build :).
  - kryptiskt 5y ago
    There were plenty of proprietary source control systems around. At my first job in 1998, we used Visual Sourcesafe, later switching to Perforce. At another job I had the misfortune to get to know Rational ClearCase.
    - kevstev 5y ago
      I am absolutely stunned that people think that source control only came around recently in this thread. CVS came out in 1990, RCS... 1982, SCCS... 1972. Visual Source Safe was commonplace in the 1990s, as terrible as it was. There may have been small teams that didn't use SC in the 1990s, but this has absolutely been a basic best practice for decades.
  - atrn 5y ago
    There were others far before Windows. In the 1980s I used Polytron version control system and the MKS port of RCS on MS-DOS.
tialaramex 5y ago
The first large project I contributed to was GIMP in the mid-1990s and that was under CVS. I think the oldest personal repositories I have are a little later under Subversion, so yeah, certainly my personal projects in the era where I first used CVS to work on GIMP did not have version control.

foobiekr 5y ago

SCM was commonplace by the mid 1980s at the latest. My CS program used CVS to submit code in the mid 1990s and as a network engineer we used RCS in 1990.

smcameron 5y ago
I remember using sccs in the '80s.

ska 5y ago

> I mean using SCM became the norm in maybe last 10-15 years more like 30, at least in a lot of the industry. Even just looking at open-ish systems, people were excited about SVN in what, 2000?, because they had been working with CVS for years, if not a decade or more, at that point.

usefulcat 5y ago

In 26 years I've never worked anywhere that didn't use SCM.