It's hard to isolate precisely 20 years ago, but I'll give you an idea of when I started, which was earlier than that.
Imagine programming without any online resource, having to find a library or bookshop to get references. No package managers, no online tools, no real web. Information was scarce!
This forced an extreme "try stuff" approach, since you didn't really have any other choice. It was also difficult to foster any kind of good practices, or share knowledge, a lot of the early work I did was kind of in the dark. I shudder to think what type of code I produced 20 years ago.
There were likely less distractions though. No Twitter nor Facebook to waste time.
There were news groups and some limited chat. Around 20 years ago this stuff started being more common, as more people had permanent connections.
I started writing tools for the web when it first started. It was plain to see how much of an impact it'd make, not just to programming, but to society as a whole.
Though, I did, and still do, C++ programming. And the cycle of code, compile, get mad, hasn't changed. :)
Project management was primarily waterfall. If you were really fancy, you called it SDLC but still it was waterfall. There was no Agile, no test driven development, no continuous integration/delivery. In the early 90's some people were talking about iterative development that eventually became Agile but it wasn't widely accepted.
Version control was relatively rare in the PC development arena until the mid-90's. This meant having your code overwritten and other such problems were common and usually resulted in interpersonal conflicts in a team.
Deployment of an application meant creating a setup program that could take into account the wide variety of personal computers. It had to fit on diskettes and later CD-ROMS. Disk/CD duplication was a big and expensive thing so you had to make sure everything was right, but it often wasn't. Patch disks had to be made although some companies had BBS systems that users could download smaller patches from at a screaming 2400bps.
The biggest online programming knowledge resource was Compuserve and BBS systems. Compuserve was quite expensive and so was long distance calling to BBS's so it became common to download/upload messages in bulk to keep this online time short. It was quite a perk when an employer would pay for this.
It was also common for programmers to have several large reference books on their language(s) of choice. Examples from these books had to be copied by hand until some of them started being sold with companion CD-ROMs. I threw my old dogeared and now mostly useless reference books away a few years ago to declutter my home office.
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What's the main difference in programming culture today vs. 20 years ago?
It's hard to isolate precisely 20 years ago, but I'll give you an idea of when I started, which was earlier than that.
Imagine programming without any online resource, having to find a library or bookshop to get references. No package managers, no online tools, no real web. Information was scarce!
This forced an extreme "try stuff" approach, since you didn't really have any other choice. It was also difficult to foster any kind of good practices, or share knowledge, a lot of the early work I did was kind of in the dark. I shudder to think what type of code I produced 20 years ago.
There were likely less distractions though. No Twitter nor Facebook to waste time.
There were news groups and some limited chat. Around 20 years ago this stuff started being more common, as more people had permanent connections.
I started writing tools for the web when it first started. It was plain to see how much of an impact it'd make, not just to programming, but to society as a whole.
Though, I did, and still do, C++ programming. And the cycle of code, compile, get mad, hasn't changed. :)
Project management was primarily waterfall. If you were really fancy, you called it SDLC but still it was waterfall. There was no Agile, no test driven development, no continuous integration/delivery. In the early 90's some people were talking about iterative development that eventually became Agile but it wasn't widely accepted.
Version control was relatively rare in the PC development arena until the mid-90's. This meant having your code overwritten and other such problems were common and usually resulted in interpersonal conflicts in a team.
Deployment of an application meant creating a setup program that could take into account the wide variety of personal computers. It had to fit on diskettes and later CD-ROMS. Disk/CD duplication was a big and expensive thing so you had to make sure everything was right, but it often wasn't. Patch disks had to be made although some companies had BBS systems that users could download smaller patches from at a screaming 2400bps.
The biggest online programming knowledge resource was Compuserve and BBS systems. Compuserve was quite expensive and so was long distance calling to BBS's so it became common to download/upload messages in bulk to keep this online time short. It was quite a perk when an employer would pay for this.
It was also common for programmers to have several large reference books on their language(s) of choice. Examples from these books had to be copied by hand until some of them started being sold with companion CD-ROMs. I threw my old dogeared and now mostly useless reference books away a few years ago to declutter my home office.