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Writing 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 an

by ido 20y ago

Writing 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 20y ago
It 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.