I think the point is that the Access, Lotus Notes tooling was in largish corporations somewhat ubiquitous.
The experience of this tooling was make a change and it was in production. It was incredibly simple and productive to work with given the needs of the time.
There was also plenty of opportunities to make a mess, but I don't think that has really changed.
Learning was not difficult, you just had to be prepared to spend time and some money on books and courses.
It is not a tooling set you would want to go back to for a bunch of different reasons but it worked well for the time.
> It is not a tooling set you would want to go back to for a bunch of different reasons but it worked well for the time.
I remember using lotus domino at one of my first jobs. There were all sorts of things I hated about it. But you could have a database - like the company’s mail database. And define views on that database (eg looking at your inbox, or a single email). And the views would replicate to a copy of that database living on all of your users’ computers. And so would the data they needed access to. It was so great - like, instead of making a website, you just defined the view based on the data itself and the data replicated behind the scenes without you needing to write any code to make that happen. (At least that’s how I understood it. I was pretty junior at the time.)
Programming for the web feels terrible in comparison. Every feature needs manual changes to the database. And the backend APIs. And the browser code. And and and. It’s a bad joke.
Commodification has a problem that for awkward teenagers to make the same fries every day, we have to ossify the process of making fries. But making good software needs us to work at both the level of this specific feature and the level of wanting more velocity for the 10 other similar features we’re implementing. Balancing those needs is hard! And most people seem content to give up on making the tooling better, and end up using whatever libraries to build web apps. And the tools we have are worse in oh so many ways compared to lotus domino decades ago.
I wonder what the original lotus notes designers think of web development. I think they’d hold it in very low regard.
The experience of this tooling was make a change and it was in production. It was incredibly simple and productive to work with given the needs of the time.
There was also plenty of opportunities to make a mess, but I don't think that has really changed.
Learning was not difficult, you just had to be prepared to spend time and some money on books and courses.
It is not a tooling set you would want to go back to for a bunch of different reasons but it worked well for the time.