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https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

I've seen this post brought up as relevant regularly up till 2010.

You may have been lucky to avoid the dredges but SW industry in the 2000s was a copy-paste fest (not in the "copy from stack overflow" sense but as in "copy paste instead of creating a function"), PHP with SQL in templates and string concat queries all over the place, MVC was a revolution. I'm not saying this was everywhere just that it was very common.

I'm sure some wise guy will come up with retort that MVC was used in the 70s and what not, but my point is a lot of the industry discovered it with Rails and Django.

The way that we teach programming these days and languages/tools/frameworks just make some bottom tier mistakes from the past impossible (or very impractical). People often ignore this context when evaluating modern framework

In the Windows world SCM was not generally available until SVN was released as a File Explorer extension. This was sometime in the 2000s. Git took several years to become viable on Windows.

IIRC, Microsoft's TFS (Team Foundation Server) also came on the scene in the early 2000's. I first used SVN around that time, before TFS became the standard at Microsoft shops.

My first employer out of university kept their code in Visual Source Safe, Microsoft's first attempt at a VCS.

It was really, really bad.

My second employer used CVS. Tags were fun back then -- each file was versioned separately so committing multiple files while a tag was in progress might result in only some of your changes making it into the tag. My big innovation there was to add a validation step to our build machine to ensure that the tag matched the state of the branch once the tag had finished, and add the tag to the build version number. Presto: we can actually see which code was built into that day's full build :).

There were plenty of proprietary source control systems around. At my first job in 1998, we used Visual Sourcesafe, later switching to Perforce.

At another job I had the misfortune to get to know Rational ClearCase.

I am absolutely stunned that people think that source control only came around recently in this thread. CVS came out in 1990, RCS... 1982, SCCS... 1972. Visual Source Safe was commonplace in the 1990s, as terrible as it was.

There may have been small teams that didn't use SC in the 1990s, but this has absolutely been a basic best practice for decades.

There were others far before Windows. In the 1980s I used Polytron version control system and the MKS port of RCS on MS-DOS.

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