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A comment on Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the Digital New York Times. Parent comment

Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by ndespres on Sunday February 24, 2019 @12:11PM (#19239393)
This is nearly 20 years ago. Were CGI and PHP really up for the tasks of serving up the type of dynamic pages at scale 2 decades ago? The "content" (articles) might be largely static but the pages are not, with dynamic ads, weather reports, showtimes etc. Not to mention getting non-technical people to adopt the language easily, transitioning from print publishing workflows. Do you not believe them when they say existing language and solutions weren't working?
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Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by scegit on Sunday February 24, 2019 @12:33PM (#19239516)
I'm not really familiar with how things were ~20 years ago, but I still believe that creating a language to use internally just for this is overkill. Dynamic ads, weather reports ... etc. are not that difficult they could have probably done it in C (maybe a custom somewhat advanced template engine?) with much less effort.
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Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by scott_s on Sunday February 24, 2019 @03:36PM (#19240472)
I think you are underestimating how novel those things were 20 years ago. The NYT has been ahead-of-the-curve when it comes to the sophistication of their webpage for about that long. Perhaps their language helped.
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Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by scegit on Sunday February 24, 2019 @04:54PM (#19240852)
It is pretty cool that they created their own language, but I was not sure if they really needed to do that. I guess it was worth it back then. Looking at their website in 2002[0] it is pretty impressive indeed. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020209001700/https://www.nytim...
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Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by mooreds on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:00PM (#19239660)
Twenty years ago I would have prototyped the solution in perl as an Apache module and then rewritten the slow hot spots in c.

But I don't know what their hardware constraints weredit person => perl

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Re:Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the ... by a-dub on Sunday February 24, 2019 @03:03PM (#19240287)
My guess is that it actually looked a lot like that, except the mod_perl app was actually a homegrown template engine using their homegrown template language which they then called "Context".

That was a common pattern back then.

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