6 ms·

Well, from what I've heard its more like FB had a mountain of PHP they couldn't ever rewrite, so they made PHP faster by turning it into C++. Fog Creek rewrote

Well, from what I've heard its more like FB had a mountain of PHP they couldn't ever rewrite, so they made PHP faster by turning it into C++. Fog Creek rewrote everything in a brand new language they invented that compiles down into multiple other languages. So, in actuality, the projects are the exact opposite of each other.

tedunangst 17y ago
Actually, the point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting anything.
tghw 17y ago
Fog Creek didn't really rewrite anything. In fact, that was the whole point of Wasabi, to not rewrite anything. Wasabi did extend VBScript to add objects and other language features, which were gradually incorporated into the code base, but just on changes going forward. So, really, it is almost exactly the same thing.
- idlewords 17y ago
  Except for the part where Facebook runs this in a production environment to serve hundreds of millions of requests and Wasabi is a toy.
  - gridspy 17y ago
    Hmmm, getting nasty there Both companies had huge investments in a code base and found a geeky way to keep their code base while reaping modern benefits. Most things are toys compared to face book, Google or Twitter. That doesn't make them pointless.
    - idlewords 17y ago
      What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope? Wasabi is an app-specific dialect of VBScript used by one company to deploy a bug tracker to small teams. HipHop is a general-purpose PHP compiler whose output is used at scale by the world's largest social networking site. I can write a file system that will work fine on my computer, with my workload, and maybe even write an essay about how productive that makes me. But I don't think you'd want to install it. These two projects are not in the same league - they're not even in the same sport - and so I am baffled to see Wasabi come up in this thread at all.
      - angelbob 17y ago
        What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope? In this case, your tone.
      - babakian 17y ago
        You've introduced a new idea here by comparing FogBugz to Facebook. Those earlier comments are comparing the strategy that Fog Creek took versus the one that Facebook has taken. The strategies are similar, and so the comparison makes sense. It should be noted that Wasabi is a general purpose programming language. It is Turing complete (up to relatively trivial finite-memory issues, just like any other general purpose programming language). Like C, for example. It should also be noted that Wasabi is a .NET language. It has full access to the .NET Framework and all of its classes. One could use Wasabi to write a C compiler. [NB: I am a Fog Creek developer, working on the FogBugz team.]
  - jerf 17y ago
    [citation needed] What evidence do you have that Wasabi is a toy? I seriously doubt you have any knowledge on the topic either way.
  - snom370 17y ago
    Except for the part where Wasabi powers FogBugz, the main product of Fog Creek Software, and enough people pay for this software to keep that company running very profitably for 10+ years.
gecko 17y ago
Cute, but completely wrong. Wasabi started out as a VBScript -> PHP compiler, allowing us to keep the existing FogBugz source, but run it on Unix and Linux, where ASP wasn't available. Once we had that, it hit us that it'd be pretty easy to add a VBScript -> VBScript compiler, at which point we could add language extensions. So we did. This allowed new code to take advantage of things like macros, better declaration syntax, lambdas and so on, without rewriting any existing code. Finally, because it was clear that ASP was dead, and specifically because we didn't want to rewrite FogBugz from scratch, we modified Wasabi to target .NET. The whole point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting FogBugz to support other platforms and technologies. I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program; if we'd done that, we'd have just done it in C#.
- _pius 17y ago
  I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program ... I think the mythology of Wasabi has become larger than life and pretty heavily distorted.
  - snom370 17y ago
    Yep. Mainly because people like to think that Joel is a completely incompetent idiot that quite naturally would do something like inventing a new language for no absolutely no reason whatsoever, never mind the fact that he's running a successful company making a successful product.
hypermatt 17y ago
Whats even worse is fog creek uses .net now, so it even makes less sense to have your own proprietary language.

tedunangst 17y ago

Actually, the point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting anything.

tghw 17y ago

Fog Creek didn't really rewrite anything. In fact, that was the whole point of Wasabi, to not rewrite anything. Wasabi did extend VBScript to add objects and other language features, which were gradually incorporated into the code base, but just on changes going forward. So, really, it is almost exactly the same thing.

idlewords 17y ago
Except for the part where Facebook runs this in a production environment to serve hundreds of millions of requests and Wasabi is a toy.
- gridspy 17y ago
  Hmmm, getting nasty there Both companies had huge investments in a code base and found a geeky way to keep their code base while reaping modern benefits. Most things are toys compared to face book, Google or Twitter. That doesn't make them pointless.
  - idlewords 17y ago
    What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope? Wasabi is an app-specific dialect of VBScript used by one company to deploy a bug tracker to small teams. HipHop is a general-purpose PHP compiler whose output is used at scale by the world's largest social networking site. I can write a file system that will work fine on my computer, with my workload, and maybe even write an essay about how productive that makes me. But I don't think you'd want to install it. These two projects are not in the same league - they're not even in the same sport - and so I am baffled to see Wasabi come up in this thread at all.
    - angelbob 17y ago
      What is nasty about pointing out this difference in scope? In this case, your tone.
    - babakian 17y ago
      You've introduced a new idea here by comparing FogBugz to Facebook. Those earlier comments are comparing the strategy that Fog Creek took versus the one that Facebook has taken. The strategies are similar, and so the comparison makes sense. It should be noted that Wasabi is a general purpose programming language. It is Turing complete (up to relatively trivial finite-memory issues, just like any other general purpose programming language). Like C, for example. It should also be noted that Wasabi is a .NET language. It has full access to the .NET Framework and all of its classes. One could use Wasabi to write a C compiler. [NB: I am a Fog Creek developer, working on the FogBugz team.]
- jerf 17y ago
  [citation needed] What evidence do you have that Wasabi is a toy? I seriously doubt you have any knowledge on the topic either way.
- snom370 17y ago
  Except for the part where Wasabi powers FogBugz, the main product of Fog Creek Software, and enough people pay for this software to keep that company running very profitably for 10+ years.

gecko 17y ago

Cute, but completely wrong. Wasabi started out as a VBScript -> PHP compiler, allowing us to keep the existing FogBugz source, but run it on Unix and Linux, where ASP wasn't available. Once we had that, it hit us that it'd be pretty easy to add a VBScript -> VBScript compiler, at which point we could add language extensions. So we did. This allowed new code to take advantage of things like macros, better declaration syntax, lambdas and so on, without rewriting any existing code. Finally, because it was clear that ASP was dead, and specifically because we didn't want to rewrite FogBugz from scratch, we modified Wasabi to target .NET. The whole point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting FogBugz to support other platforms and technologies. I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program; if we'd done that, we'd have just done it in C#.

_pius 17y ago
I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program ... I think the mythology of Wasabi has become larger than life and pretty heavily distorted.
- snom370 17y ago
  Yep. Mainly because people like to think that Joel is a completely incompetent idiot that quite naturally would do something like inventing a new language for no absolutely no reason whatsoever, never mind the fact that he's running a successful company making a successful product.

hypermatt 17y ago

Whats even worse is fog creek uses .net now, so it even makes less sense to have your own proprietary language.