In 2002, J2EE was having the first adoption steps, while .NET was still hot out of the factory.

Many companies were adopting Vignette or Coldfusion.

AOLServer, PHP, mod-perl and Zope were the FOSS alternatives.

Dreamweaver, Frontpage were everywhere on designer computers.

Definitely not 2002.

CF, PHP, cgi scripts in Perl, that sounds like 2002 to me!

You brought me back with Zope though, man, totally forgot about that. J2EE had a huge head start over .Net which was just coming out of microsoft to replace VB6/OCX development. I remember when C# came out how awesome it made me feel. C++ like syntax but without having to worry about memory (naively). It was great.

It did not solve the VB ASP problem, only allowed you to write your page backend in C#. Asp, Asp.cs

It sucked for about 7 years until Asp.Net MVC came out.

Tooling went from notepad/vim to Dreamweaver, to Visual Studio/Eclipse and back again.

Having been part of a MSFT Partner that was involved in the .NET launch for Portugal, I am quite sure that WebForms allowed to use VB.NET.

We were going to adopt J2EE and at last minute our CTO took Microsoft's offer to migrate our product to .NET instead, and be part of the 3rd party products to be shown at .NET launch.

The key developers that were part of this project went on to found OutSystems.

WebForms was great in terms of tooling, that is why Blazor is being positioned as where the still existing WebForms projects should transition to.

That would then make more sense with his claims.

coffeescript was created around 2009, so unlikely.