My experience with BBEdit was circa 2008, just as I was first learning to code. It's much older than that, yes.
Idk, maybe TextMate wasn't terribly similar to BBEdit, but at the time the landscape of non-IDE graphical editors was fairly limited. I'm only aware of BBEdit and TextMate on Mac, Notepad++ on Windows, and Gedit and Kate on Linux (there were also the vaguely graphical ports of emacs and vim on all platforms, but I won't count those). So I see TextMate as, at the very least, being part of a genre of text editor defined by BBEdit.
Idk, maybe TextMate wasn't terribly similar to BBEdit, but at the time the landscape of non-IDE graphical editors was fairly limited. I'm only aware of BBEdit and TextMate on Mac, Notepad++ on Windows, and Gedit and Kate on Linux (there were also the vaguely graphical ports of emacs and vim on all platforms, but I won't count those). So I see TextMate as, at the very least, being part of a genre of text editor defined by BBEdit.