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by mattmanser
4188 days ago
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There were a lot less tutorials, they tended to be for Linux/Mac, it was rare to find windows installers, some python libraries didn't work at all on windows without some seriously complicated compiler knowledge. It might have been easy to go php > ruby, but C# > ruby meant massive amounts of pain or complety changing your environments. While my company at the time had VMs, they were all windows and it wasn't a case of simply spinning up an EC2 to play. The pain of leaving a MS stack was massive. I'm using ruby/python a bit interchangeably as I was.playing with both, but even things like gem took a load of effot compared to now. Like a couple of days of fiddling doing nothing interesting, not programming but constantly hitting errors or tutorials not working as you'd got a step earlier in the chain slightly wrong. It was a huge barrier to entry. The worst tutorials claimed to be for both windows and linux, but would link to an out of date windows installer and all the command line commands would be for linux. I once made the mistake of thinking I'd write little maintenance scripts in Python instead of VB, it was great until I tried to connect to a MSSQL environment, ended up in a world of pain. Last time I span up node.js on a new windows computer it took me like 10 minutes. Everything has changed. |
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That said, I see what you're getting at now and it isn't what I thought you were talking about previously. It looks like what you're talking about is it taking a few days (or so) to get a working environment up and running vs. nearly instantaneous now? If so, fair enough I totally agree.
I thought you were talking more about the more nuts & bolts parts, like it taking a few weeks to come up to speed on Python (for instance) instead of several months. I've always felt that claims of it being difficult to change languages or other type things (e.g. changing from Oracle to MySQL) were radically overblown, and these days w/ sites like SO it's pretty much trivial.