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Spolsky seems to be a less fashionable idol than he was when I started to become interested in startups. In the context of programming AND startups, his opinion

Spolsky seems to be a less fashionable idol than he was when I started to become interested in startups. In the context of programming AND startups, his opinions have much more weight to me than XP proponents'. Joel has created a successful company that is apparently fun to work in, have shipped several working and commercially successful products and made a service for human-kind by designing and successfully launching programming Q&A site that doesn't suck. Plus his writings inspired a generation of programmers to start companies, just like PG's writings did later. Contrast this with Extreme Programming that OP embraces as a third option compared to duct tape programming vs analysis-paralysis. I was very excited about XP when I was young and inexperienced programmer, but nowadays XP sounds much more snake-oil salesmanship to me than Joel's opinions. Did original XP gang work in startup like environments, or were they actually solving problems (payroll systems) that they and many others had already solved? And Kent Beck seems to be still working on jUnit (and trying to find a way to monetize it), not shipping new products. My kudos goes to Joel and duct tape programmers around the world.

barrkel 16y ago
Let us never forget that the project XP originated with, Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System, never actually shipped.
- gaius 16y ago
  Another Ron Jeffries special. Him and Uncle Bob, do the opposite of what they say and you'll do fine.
gaius 16y ago
Joel seems to talk a lot of sense but this is tempered for me by two things. 1) no-one I know uses any of his products and 2) I have a hard time believing he really is able to attract the top talent to work on a project management tool written in VB.
- mhp 16y ago
  It's written in ASP.NET, not VB.
  - martin 16y ago
    Really? Since when? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript) http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"
    - gaius 16y ago
      I love that first article; after many paragraphs extolling the "safe" choices, at the end he casually slips in that he's actually using a language that no-one else in the world is. Nevertheless, Wasabi is to VB as Arc is to Lisp.
    - mhp 16y ago
      I'm totally wrong. I meant to write .NET (not ASP.NET) and .NET isn't even a language, so I'm doubly wrong. It's probably been four years since I've touched the code :\ It isn't written in VB and never was. In 2000 it was written in classic ASP (vbscript) and c++. Probably a few years after that it was converted to Wasabi, which at the time was very close to VBScript, but is now equivalent to C#. For the last few years it is shipped as a .NET product on both windows and unix, and the /Dev.html page you cited is accurate. (The articles you cited from four years ago aren't accurate anymore). http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/
- slantyyz 16y ago
  1 I have used and paid to use Fogbugz. I've used JIRA as well, and I would choose Fogbugz over JIRA any day, despite the silly name. Since I've gone independent, I use the free version of hosted Fogbugz (Fog Creek is kind enough to offer it for free for independents and startups). --edit it's free for students too 2 I'm of the opinion that truly top talent doesn't care about the language. It's the programming problems they care about. Fogbugz does some non trivial stuff like evidence based scheduling. I'm sure some top programmers would find that interesting, regardless of whether it's programmed in a vb-like syntax or not. Having said that, Joel says a lot of things, some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. It's the Internet. Opinions are plentiful, and we're all free to agree or disagree.

barrkel 16y ago

Let us never forget that the project XP originated with, Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System, never actually shipped.

gaius 16y ago
Another Ron Jeffries special. Him and Uncle Bob, do the opposite of what they say and you'll do fine.

gaius 16y ago

Joel seems to talk a lot of sense but this is tempered for me by two things. 1) no-one I know uses any of his products and 2) I have a hard time believing he really is able to attract the top talent to work on a project management tool written in VB.

mhp 16y ago
It's written in ASP.NET, not VB.
- martin 16y ago
  Really? Since when? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript) http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"
  - gaius 16y ago
    I love that first article; after many paragraphs extolling the "safe" choices, at the end he casually slips in that he's actually using a language that no-one else in the world is. Nevertheless, Wasabi is to VB as Arc is to Lisp.
  - mhp 16y ago
    I'm totally wrong. I meant to write .NET (not ASP.NET) and .NET isn't even a language, so I'm doubly wrong. It's probably been four years since I've touched the code :\ It isn't written in VB and never was. In 2000 it was written in classic ASP (vbscript) and c++. Probably a few years after that it was converted to Wasabi, which at the time was very close to VBScript, but is now equivalent to C#. For the last few years it is shipped as a .NET product on both windows and unix, and the /Dev.html page you cited is accurate. (The articles you cited from four years ago aren't accurate anymore). http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/
slantyyz 16y ago
1 I have used and paid to use Fogbugz. I've used JIRA as well, and I would choose Fogbugz over JIRA any day, despite the silly name. Since I've gone independent, I use the free version of hosted Fogbugz (Fog Creek is kind enough to offer it for free for independents and startups). --edit it's free for students too 2 I'm of the opinion that truly top talent doesn't care about the language. It's the programming problems they care about. Fogbugz does some non trivial stuff like evidence based scheduling. I'm sure some top programmers would find that interesting, regardless of whether it's programmed in a vb-like syntax or not. Having said that, Joel says a lot of things, some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. It's the Internet. Opinions are plentiful, and we're all free to agree or disagree.