[com2kid]

> But the bigger lesson is bitterer. Frontend tooling isnt worth that much.

This is a modern oddity, as historically front end tooling was worth a lot.

During the 80s and 90s, multiple companies made a lot of money off of front end tooling. Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft. But think of how popular Flash was and the empire that helped build. Prior to that. Visual Basic helped Microsoft take over the world. Go back another generation and Borland's Delphi dominated for years.

And, arguably, all of those systems were more productive than anything we have now. (A topic I've written about many times!) As an industry, we may indeed be getting exactly what we pay for.

[yen223]

I lived through the times when you had to pay lots of money for software tooling. As a kid from a third-world country, I don't share the same rosy sentiment towards those times.

It's too easy to take for granted, but modern-day free open-source tooling is a godsend for a lot of folks out there.

[com2kid]

Historically software companies were smart enough to overlook piracy outside of their key markets. Plenty of poor American kids learned to program on pirated copies of visual studio.

Some point the company's got greedy and decided they want to crack down in all piracy. This shortsightedness first hit Adobe. I'd estimate that half the people who know photoshop learned it on a pirated copy. The harder Adobe makes piracy, the fewer kids teach themselves photoshop.

Microsoft, to their credit, made Visual Studio Community Edition, although IMHO they nerfed the first few releases too much.

You can view commercial software with overlooked piracy as a form of the rich subsidizing everyone else.

Again it is unfortunate that companies got greedy and tore the system down for a one time boost in revenue.

[rapind]

> Microsoft, to their credit, made Visual Studio Community Edition, although IMHO they nerfed the first few releases too much.

"Developers, developers, developers". IMO Steve was right... also VB 4-6 was amazing.

[swyx]

until it goes unmaintained because nobody pays for it

[MikeTheGreat]

> Even as late as 2009 or so, Silverlight tooling was bringing in money for Microsoft

Huh. It always kinda seemed like a "Microsoft's version of <...>, because Microsoft always has to compete with everything, including <...>". In this case, <...> is "Adobe Flash"

I'm curious if people have examples of what it was used for?

Looking at the Wikipedia page [1] which says

"According to statowl.com, Microsoft Silverlight had a penetration of 64.2% in May 2011. Usage on July 2010 was 53.6%, whereas as of May 2011 market leader Adobe Flash was installed on 95.3% of browsers, and Java was supported on 76.5% of browsers.[10]"

That shocked me - what was this used for, anyways?

Wikipedia goes on to say

"Silverlight was used to provide video streaming for the NBC coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,[11] the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver,[12] and the 2008 conventions for both major United States political parties.[13] Silverlight was also used by Amazon Video and Netflix for their instant video streaming services"

If Silverlight was being used for Netflix I can see it being installed on 60%+ of browsers just from that.

Still, I'm curious - anybody have have examples of what else it was used for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight

[com2kid]

Silverlight's real usage was rapid internal corporate app development. Internal tools basically. It is hard to describe exactly how absurdly popular Silverlight was at the time within corporations.

Microsoft had a big internal political battle and did the stupidest thing possible and abandoned Silveright, which pissed off a LOT of companies, who then started building internal web apps instead. This lead to a slow migration off of Microsoft's technology stack within companies, and now basically Office is what is left.

For younger developers, it is hard to describe what life was like before.

So you'd go to work, and there was a custom C#, or possibly Visual Basic, time tracking app you logged into. Internal corporate web pages were written in ASP, or ASPX. Lots of internal databases were running on SQL server or just MS Access, and you directly talked to them through custom apps running on your machine.

Because the C#/VB development experience was so good, this was honestly easier than writing a website is now. Because apps only had to run on one platform (Windows) and mobile didn't exist yet, making UIs was easy-peasy. Microsoft made a ton of inroads into corporate because Bob from Accounting figured out he could setup a database running off of a local file share (MS Access) and write a simple GUI to keep track of vacation usage using some books he found in his local library, or maybe he even got ahold of some old MSDN CDs, which literally had higher quality documentation and examples than anything made in the last 15 years or so.

Silverlight was a continuation of that linage, super easy to write UIs in, super fast to develop. You could data bind a form to a backend database in a few minutes. You'd get full accessibility, hotkeys, everything, faster than you can debug a single CSS issue.

From what I understand (I was a very low level employee when it all went down) the OS org got pissed that the developer org was basically making the dominant UI framework, ripped it away from them and rewrote it as WinRT. Short of it is, Microsoft ended up losing mobile, they lost the trust of corporations, and they lost the trust of developers. After Silverlight died there aren't really anymore "Windows developers" as a career field. Everything moved to websites.

[Lutger]

Good analysis. They really killed the golden goose, never understood it. But internal rivalry makes sense, the same thing that bankrupted Nokia.

I know a lot of developers that were really happy in that older Microsoft ecosystem, it was a semi permeable walled garden where you could walk 'the Microsoft way' and everything was kind of laid out before you, neat and cosy. At the dev conferences when javascript started to become unavoidable, there was still a period where they kind of pretended Microsoft invented the web and gave it a nice but small spot alongside all the other, more important technology with which Real Developers make Real Software.

You could have discussions on architecture, but nothing fundamental really, and you'd always follow the prescribed pathways that Microsoft thought out for you. These changed every couple of years, which gave everybody new goals, new certifications to reach, new rewrites to accomplish and get paid for. Anyone that was moderately skilled was quite productive, and it was very easy to get into.

When the web got more complicated than html + jquery in server side generated templates, these developers often had a very bad time and fully retreated into their 'backend' role. The most recent anti javascript stronghold is Blazor, not sure if that is still a viable way to avoid modern frontend tooling.

I never really understood why Microsoft abandoned desktop gui apps like they did and left their walled garden unattended. It was one of their strong points, even though I disliked it a lot.

[neonsunset]

Silverlight legacy lives on in the form of https://opensilver.net. I don't have experience with it, but am going to assume that it's a shadow of the former self.

They do have a pretty cool demo project however: https://xaml.io

[MikeTheGreat]

Thanks for the reply! That was very illuminating!

I remember Access + SQL Server being popular, and ASP/ASPX being popular, and Visual Studio experience being easy + popular, and never quite understood why everyone switched to the web stack.

[mirchiseth]

SAP used it for their CRM when they moved from desktop client to browser based clients.

[skeeter2020]

we used it for a highly interactive scheduler UI in a commercial software project. The appeal was do Flash development with .Net developers.

[swyx]

yes good point. ofc Unity/Unreal Engine today also makes great money.

i think those frontends you mention made money because they had defacto monopoly on a certain platform or kind of experience that was unavailable anywhere else. xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it.

perhaps the emergence of web standards - both JS and browser standards - killed frontend. when everyone can build their own tools that run everywhere, and the browser api's are often pretty good, then why buy instead of build, or pick the next one that is free and good enough.

[com2kid]

> xcode is a piece of absolute crap but i still have to pay $100 a year or whatever for it.

You say xcode is horrible, but have you tried opening a project in Android Studio after 6 months and getting it to compile again?

It was funny, when I was at Microsoft, almost no one used Visual Studio because it wasn't able to handle code on the scale of MS's code bases. (I think things may be different now). That and it didn't support unusual build scenarios (which now it does.)

I wonder if it is the same case at Apple with xcode. Do OS engineers on MacOS actually use xcode to developer MacOS?

[sakesun]

I'd blame web browser model for productivity problem we are having now.