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I'm not sure I'd want advice on the value (or lack) of simplicity, from someone who is in part responsible for Visual Basic, and has two main products that are

I'm not sure I'd want advice on the value (or lack) of simplicity, from someone who is in part responsible for Visual Basic, and has two main products that are far from either top notch or tremendous financial successes and which are coded in a monstrous ad-hoc compiler that spits out PHP and/from ASP. That said, he has written several good project management essays --if you skim though all his bullshit UI and interview advice. I mean, UI advice from the man responsible for CityDesk??! Well, at least you can't fault his very good mercurial tutorial, or Stack Overflow.

jiggy2011 15y ago
It may be popular to hate VB, but it was certainly much simpler to develop with than the C++ Windows SDK was at that time. Surprisingly powerful too. I remember building both a point/click adventure game , a poker game and an organizer app from scratch without any formal CS education. From what I remember Joel was responsible for VBA, which brought programming to people who had no idea what a pointer was. Of course this spawned some of the most badly written business apps out there, but that's hardly his fault. Are they still using their own compiler? Never really understood the reasoning behind that , I believe it was to make it compatible with Windows and Unix, but surely they could have simply written the app in php and bundled it with apache all statically linked together? Pherhaps CityDesk was not the best thing ever, but nobody gets it right every time.
- ams6110 15y ago
  IIRC they wanted to make an existing ASP app (FogBugz?) and be able to sell it to Unix shops, ergo a cross-compiler that spit out PHP from ASP. They did not want to maintain two distinct codebases. From that, it evolved into an in-house bespoke development language. Also IIRC, in its day CityDesk was a fair bit simpler than other website management systems.

jiggy2011 15y ago

It may be popular to hate VB, but it was certainly much simpler to develop with than the C++ Windows SDK was at that time. Surprisingly powerful too. I remember building both a point/click adventure game , a poker game and an organizer app from scratch without any formal CS education. From what I remember Joel was responsible for VBA, which brought programming to people who had no idea what a pointer was. Of course this spawned some of the most badly written business apps out there, but that's hardly his fault. Are they still using their own compiler? Never really understood the reasoning behind that , I believe it was to make it compatible with Windows and Unix, but surely they could have simply written the app in php and bundled it with apache all statically linked together? Pherhaps CityDesk was not the best thing ever, but nobody gets it right every time.

ams6110 15y ago
IIRC they wanted to make an existing ASP app (FogBugz?) and be able to sell it to Unix shops, ergo a cross-compiler that spit out PHP from ASP. They did not want to maintain two distinct codebases. From that, it evolved into an in-house bespoke development language. Also IIRC, in its day CityDesk was a fair bit simpler than other website management systems.