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"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be comp
by Elfan 19y ago
"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
- ido 19y agoWriting your main cash cow in a private, in-house language seems like one of the riskier decisions you can make. If they would have at least open sourced it and tried to get some sort of community around it it would have at least start to become less dangerous as the community grows. But programming your main (only?) product in a language nobody except your current employees knows? Employee turnover must be even more of a bitch over there then it is in most companies. I wouldn't want to work there when this "one of our best developers" quits/dies/retires
- shiro 19y agoIt depends. I've got an impression that Wasabi is highly-specialized domain-specific language (just a wild guess from his article). If it is a general-purpose language it's worth to build a community and get feedback, but if it's a niche DSL, it's less likely that you get a growable community and it's more likely that feedback tends to be feature requests that aren't necessary for the original purpose of DSL. And if it is designed well, the risk of the original developper's quitting is just about the same as having in-house libraries or workflow, I think.