I'm personally a fan of lisp and wish it would have had a more prominent place in tech history.
It would have also been better if Java was Open Source about a decade before it was ... but that ship has sailed.
Like many teams, we'd start a branch with an issue number and you'd write code to it. Eventually you'd merge it to your main branch for the product.
You of course can do the same in Git. However, let's say you just find a given line of code and you can't think how it came to be there. You 'blame' the file and find the commit hash.
In Mercurial, you'd just look up the commit hash and find the branch. In git... well, you've got a few options - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2706797/finding-what-bra...
Git won the war for some reason and it might just be because the services surrounding it were superior (i.e. Github vs Bitbucket). I don't believe it's because of it being a superior technology or user experience however.
Of course, you can still use Mercurial today but you'll feel like a second-class citizen if you do.
Super small exe files that just run on any windows platform from Win xp to Windows 10(?).
Also ready made components for almost everything on torry.net!
My reaction after building the executable: wait, is that just one file? Do you mean I don't have to worry about all the crap with VBRUN432.DLL and all the other files that made my program not look cool?
The executables were already small, and I used ASPack to compress them even further. I coded fun utilities like file patchers, and some interesting network programs.
I couldn't get back to it a few years later because there was this Embarcadero thing that I felt got in the way.
IBM research really should release the FL compiler they wrote! They stopped working on it in the early 90s, and haven't said a single thing about it since.
There is the beginnings of a Haskell implementation that I tried to mess with a bit, but I don't know enough Haskell to get anywhere: https://github.com/jgrimes/fl-hs
Some of these continue to exist but seem to lack adoption and/or prominent support.
Also a distribution model that isn't dependent on a third party's app store.
That's exactly why those technologies died off. Flash and Java have massive security issues that neither Adobe nor Oracle are capable of fixing.
That said, you should be pretty happy about WASM then.
There was briefly a thought that Chrome might bundle DartVM but the Dart v1 in the browser effort was a failure.
and
xmpp
Later on (2006-maybe?) I preffered writing in java, i.e. generics and for-each and checked-exceptions were awesome in my opinion, I think I solved like half of my programming problems by just importing TreeMap :D , but I still missed the VB6 form-builder :)