7 ms·

At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the cr

At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years. I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging. Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy. Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future. (We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)

oscardelben 13y ago
You should have used lisp :p
ced 13y ago
During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- cbsmith 13y ago
  That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).
  - rurounijones 13y ago
    I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy. e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".
    - cbsmith 13y ago
      > I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it. > Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs? I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you. As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)
      - rurounijones 13y ago
        Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context. The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.
        cbsmith 13y ago
        > The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry. Consider yourself surprised then. ;-) Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages. There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_. I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.
- ianstallings 13y ago
  Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)

oscardelben 13y ago

You should have used lisp :p

ced 13y ago

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

cbsmith 13y ago
That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).
- rurounijones 13y ago
  I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy. e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    > I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it. > Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs? I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you. As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)
    - rurounijones 13y ago
      Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context. The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.
      - cbsmith 13y ago
        > The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry. Consider yourself surprised then. ;-) Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages. There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_. I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.
ianstallings 13y ago
Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)