2003 was a completely different era for technical detail. That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.
People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave .
Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it.
Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP, pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl.
Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and not just a rehashed Android UI.
Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again blaming whoever.
Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those days.
I agree with everything you said, apart from "That kind of detail normally only sat in corporations.". I do not agree with it, because it applied to many open source projects.
I do, I never understood it then, I do now. Hybrid Ircd is what I used for my server. You were cool if you used Ratbox, and Unreal I never unstood why you needed +a and +q
Documentation was never fun so I'll use my age as an alibi. I was just a script kiddie and recalling downloading MB's of scripts and uploading them on to polarhome [0] where some awesome swede was hosting shell access to different systems on his home DSL. Me kitted with my three-hour limited 56k and my fathers work 128K ISDN line.
Oh well, nostalgia over back to work, writing IT architecture docs.
I’m 50, and I can tell you exactly what happened - AOL. Plus the death of the BBS. Usenet started changing radically in the late 90s, and the independence BBS operators had wasn’t appealing enough to keep them running dial up services, nor was it generally appealing enough to keep people logging in over modem when the baby internet was available.
All that said, I want to be clear that I’m still partial to TCL - an elegant highly usable language, and happy to fight you over it.
Driving character out of the software world. Spotify couldn't whip the llama's ass even if it wanted to. And it doesn't want to. Spotify is a boring office worker that we're professionally cordial with only because they run the stockroom.
If you looked at 'old' software companies that existed at 2000, they were boring companies like IBM. Really what most people don't want to admit is most of the software world grew up and got old.
People would jump in, contribute their part, write a bit and leave. Folk were willing to contribute ideas to your project and assist in parts you got stuck. You learnt and understood by studying the source you were given or obtained. There were less expectations, if you had a half-baked thing folk gave you grave .
Code was more optimistic, fun and free for all. You didn't get lynched for not having a license or for not using $LANG. You grabbed something from Sourceforge and ran with it.
Why are you not using Python!? Why are you coding in TCL. PHP, pathetic. eww, you use IRC? lol perl.
Forums were rampant, the internet was a friendly place; LAN parties were awesome and the internet had rainbow coloured fences not grey greased walls like now were climbing over are a struggle requiring you to leave with one or the other. The world wasn't as depressed and a new phone was a new phone and not just a rehashed Android UI.
Where did we go wrong is an answer that cannot be answered other than we seem to keep making the same mistakes over and over again blaming whoever.
Granted I was 15, so naivety. Thirty Seven this year and still waiting for someone to code the time machine to relive those days.
/me goes and scours sourceforge