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It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsk

It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsky's numerous blog posts on the topic) made such a colossal error as writing their own language, and that it took them a decade to realize this mistake. I also find this kind of phrasing weird: > The people who wrote the original Wasabi compiler moved on for one reason or another. Some married partners who lived elsewhere; others went over to work on other products from Fog Creek. It's like the author of this article goes out of their ways to avoid saying that some people left the company, period. It also wouldn't surprise me if some of these defections were caused by Wasabi itself. As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company (yet another reason why rolling your own language as a critical part of your product is a terrible idea).

joshstrange 11y ago
> It's like the author of this article goes out of their ways to avoid saying that some people left the company, period. It also wouldn't surprise me if some of these defections were caused by Wasabi itself. As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company (yet another reason why rolling your own language as a critical part of your product is a terrible idea). I also found that passage oddly worded. We get it, people don't stick around forever, you don't have to try and hide it like it's some dirty little secret. Also as developer I doubt I would have wanted anything to do with a closed-source internal-only poorly-documented language. You may learn some concepts that transfer but by and large you will have to start from scratch when you leave and you won't have skills people are looking for. Also if you do dive headfirst into Wasabi and love it and then leave you probably will be that annoying fuck at your new company that says shit like "Well in Wasabi this was easy...." or "Wasabi makes this problem non-existant because...." Shut up, no one cares. It's crazy to me to think of a company as small as Fog Creek would attempt something like this but to be fair I was born and learned to develop in a different environment than they did so maybe the tools and languages available back then really just couldn't cut it.
ExpiredLink 11y ago
> It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (...) made such a colossal error as writing their own language Just like ... Rust.
- Jweb_Guru 11y ago
  There are no other languages that could replace Rust for Mozilla due to their combination of performance and safety requirements. It is also the product of Mozilla's research arm, which is not directly focused on immediate productization and employs several people with PLT backgrounds full-time. Finally, Rust has always been an open-source projects and has developed a robust non-Mozilla community that contributes heavily to the compiler. None of these is true of Wasabi. In any case, Spolsky still firmly believes that Netscape would have been better off today if they had continued work on the (completely unsalvagable) Netscape 4.x. Having extensively reviewed the history, Joel was dead wrong about this. There's no reason to assume his advice is more trustworthy than that of any other "thought leader," or that it is consistently followed within his own company.
- pnathan 11y ago
  Actually, Rust was Graydon's personal project for a while, then Mozilla adopted it.
tptacek 11y ago
It has always struck me as extremely bizarre that computer science graduates would recoil from someone solving a business problem using what appears to be very basic compiler theory. The second half of your comment transitions from weird to mean-spirited, as you begin speculating about people you don't know and their reasons for changing jobs. I'm a little confused as to why you've been voted up so high on the page.
- npinguy 11y ago
  Because it's bizarre and stands out. The clarifying sentence of marrying people that live elsewhere etc screams of "the lady doth protest too much". There's nothing wrong with saying "Over time, and over the natural turnover that happens at all companies, none of the original Wasabi designers are no longer working at FogBugz". Sure, some snarky people will make the comment "Oh yeah, I bet they left BECAUSE of Wasabi", but most will ignore them. By completely negating the possibility that any of those people left for any reasons not involving family, it actually seems to INCREASE the probability that Wasabi was more unpopular within FogCreek than Joel would prefer to admit.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Do you know anyone at Fog Creek, or even anyone who has ever worked there? Did they tell you something that would lead you to believe that a blogger for Fog Creek would, completely unprompted and with no real need, make up stories about why people left? Or could I just as easily argue, with the same total lack of grounding, that you're a secret shill for Atlassian trying to poison the well? (You aren't, of course, but you take my meaning.)
    - df07 11y ago
      Good news, I actually do know everyone who was part of the original build of Wasabi! None of them left because of the language. I think this accounts for everyone who was there at the time: 1. Original author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-country and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time. 2. Second author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-state and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time (see a pattern?). Later came back because Fog Creek offered remote work. Went on to author the blog post we're talking about. 3. Developer left to go work on Stack Exchange (me!) 4. Developer left to go make the world a better place at Khan Academy 5. 2x developer left to go work on Trello I think that was all of us. People move on in the course of 5+ years. Turns out most of those reasons don't have to do with programming language. FWIW, I think Wasabi was a bad decision and I'm not going to defend it. But I really don't like these massive assumptions about people's motivations for leaving.
rwmj 11y ago
It's not necessarily true that it was an error. Their customers wanted Linux support, and they avoided the greater evil of having to rewrite their code or maintain two codebases (remember - this is ~2000 and there's no .Net or Mono, and all their code is written in old [edit:] VBScript). It's a great example of path dependency however. BTW: Red Hat has been here too. We converted a huge app from .Net to Java by using some translation software: http://lpeer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/switching-from-c-to-java.html http://lpeer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/switching-from-c-to-java...
- Marazan 11y ago
  They did rewrite their code base. That's the point. The went from writing VBScript to writing Wasabi.
  - thedufer 11y ago
    I don't think they did. Wasabi was originally the subset of VBScript that they were already using. Also, there's a big difference between a rewrite and rewriting but maintaining both versions.
- toyg 11y ago
  So in a way, the original mistake was made even before FogBasic/Wasabi entered the picture: by buying into the wonderful MS ecosystem, FogCreek condemned themselves to 10 years of hacks for cross-platform support. And they've learnt their lesson so well that they're now consolidating on C#, another de-facto MS-only technology which only benefits from the fact that someone else (Mono) is doing cross-platform hacks for everyone. Joel is great, but this choice baffled me in the past and baffles me today. For the sort of software FogBugz is, they would have had a much simpler life with Java, Python, Ruby, even Perl. Despite all of Joel's insight into "making html sing", he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros "because that's what we know".
  - stevoski 11y ago
    IIRC, Joel once wrote that he started coding FogBugz to learn some VBScript. Once you start a project in a language, there is a mighty amount of inertia to overcome to move to a different language...
w8rbt 11y ago
I'm not sure that it took them "a decade to realize the mistake". They realized it early on. It just took them awhile to fix it.
andyjohnson0 11y ago
I came away with a different impression to you: in the past there were good reasons to develop their own language; they recognised that those reasons no longer exist; they used modern tools to dig their way out from underneath the accumulated debt. Nowadays we have open-source runtimes, .net running on multiple platforms, and componentised tools like Roslyn. It is easy to forget that the .net tooling from 10+ years ago was much more limited. Writing you own language is an unusual approach, so descriptions of dealing with that kind of technical debt are rare. I thought this article was valuable and interesting.
danielweber 11y ago
Spending time working on Wasabi is only damaging to your career because of the current fad in hiring software developers that says "5+ years of Go development required." I work with at least 10 languages a week. There is zero chance of us hiring people with years of experience in all those. We want people who have used multiple languages, and someone who worked on compiling one language into another would completely satisfy that itch.
krallja 11y ago
Sorry about the weird phrasing. See df07's summary of where we ended up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778724
dionidium 11y ago
> As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company I wouldn't worry about this at all. The choice of language on project n has never once negatively affected my work on project n + 1. As a programmer, my job has a lot more to do with solving problems (in the generic sense) than it does the tools I'm using to solve them.
brudgers 11y ago
Business software that provides business value is good software. FogCreek has been shipping Fogbugz to paying customers for fifteen years. If that's not success, it will do until success shows up. If that's a colossal error, where do I get one?

joshstrange 11y ago

> It's like the author of this article goes out of their ways to avoid saying that some people left the company, period. It also wouldn't surprise me if some of these defections were caused by Wasabi itself. As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company (yet another reason why rolling your own language as a critical part of your product is a terrible idea). I also found that passage oddly worded. We get it, people don't stick around forever, you don't have to try and hide it like it's some dirty little secret. Also as developer I doubt I would have wanted anything to do with a closed-source internal-only poorly-documented language. You may learn some concepts that transfer but by and large you will have to start from scratch when you leave and you won't have skills people are looking for. Also if you do dive headfirst into Wasabi and love it and then leave you probably will be that annoying fuck at your new company that says shit like "Well in Wasabi this was easy...." or "Wasabi makes this problem non-existant because...." Shut up, no one cares. It's crazy to me to think of a company as small as Fog Creek would attempt something like this but to be fair I was born and learned to develop in a different environment than they did so maybe the tools and languages available back then really just couldn't cut it.

ExpiredLink 11y ago

> It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (...) made such a colossal error as writing their own language Just like ... Rust.

Jweb_Guru 11y ago
There are no other languages that could replace Rust for Mozilla due to their combination of performance and safety requirements. It is also the product of Mozilla's research arm, which is not directly focused on immediate productization and employs several people with PLT backgrounds full-time. Finally, Rust has always been an open-source projects and has developed a robust non-Mozilla community that contributes heavily to the compiler. None of these is true of Wasabi. In any case, Spolsky still firmly believes that Netscape would have been better off today if they had continued work on the (completely unsalvagable) Netscape 4.x. Having extensively reviewed the history, Joel was dead wrong about this. There's no reason to assume his advice is more trustworthy than that of any other "thought leader," or that it is consistently followed within his own company.
pnathan 11y ago
Actually, Rust was Graydon's personal project for a while, then Mozilla adopted it.

tptacek 11y ago

It has always struck me as extremely bizarre that computer science graduates would recoil from someone solving a business problem using what appears to be very basic compiler theory. The second half of your comment transitions from weird to mean-spirited, as you begin speculating about people you don't know and their reasons for changing jobs. I'm a little confused as to why you've been voted up so high on the page.

npinguy 11y ago
Because it's bizarre and stands out. The clarifying sentence of marrying people that live elsewhere etc screams of "the lady doth protest too much". There's nothing wrong with saying "Over time, and over the natural turnover that happens at all companies, none of the original Wasabi designers are no longer working at FogBugz". Sure, some snarky people will make the comment "Oh yeah, I bet they left BECAUSE of Wasabi", but most will ignore them. By completely negating the possibility that any of those people left for any reasons not involving family, it actually seems to INCREASE the probability that Wasabi was more unpopular within FogCreek than Joel would prefer to admit.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Do you know anyone at Fog Creek, or even anyone who has ever worked there? Did they tell you something that would lead you to believe that a blogger for Fog Creek would, completely unprompted and with no real need, make up stories about why people left? Or could I just as easily argue, with the same total lack of grounding, that you're a secret shill for Atlassian trying to poison the well? (You aren't, of course, but you take my meaning.)
  - df07 11y ago
    Good news, I actually do know everyone who was part of the original build of Wasabi! None of them left because of the language. I think this accounts for everyone who was there at the time: 1. Original author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-country and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time. 2. Second author left because his wife was going to medical school out-of-state and Fog Creek didn't allow remote work at the time (see a pattern?). Later came back because Fog Creek offered remote work. Went on to author the blog post we're talking about. 3. Developer left to go work on Stack Exchange (me!) 4. Developer left to go make the world a better place at Khan Academy 5. 2x developer left to go work on Trello I think that was all of us. People move on in the course of 5+ years. Turns out most of those reasons don't have to do with programming language. FWIW, I think Wasabi was a bad decision and I'm not going to defend it. But I really don't like these massive assumptions about people's motivations for leaving.

rwmj 11y ago

It's not necessarily true that it was an error. Their customers wanted Linux support, and they avoided the greater evil of having to rewrite their code or maintain two codebases (remember - this is ~2000 and there's no .Net or Mono, and all their code is written in old [edit:] VBScript). It's a great example of path dependency however. BTW: Red Hat has been here too. We converted a huge app from .Net to Java by using some translation software: http://lpeer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/switching-from-c-to-java.html http://lpeer.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/switching-from-c-to-java...

Marazan 11y ago
They did rewrite their code base. That's the point. The went from writing VBScript to writing Wasabi.
- thedufer 11y ago
  I don't think they did. Wasabi was originally the subset of VBScript that they were already using. Also, there's a big difference between a rewrite and rewriting but maintaining both versions.
toyg 11y ago
So in a way, the original mistake was made even before FogBasic/Wasabi entered the picture: by buying into the wonderful MS ecosystem, FogCreek condemned themselves to 10 years of hacks for cross-platform support. And they've learnt their lesson so well that they're now consolidating on C#, another de-facto MS-only technology which only benefits from the fact that someone else (Mono) is doing cross-platform hacks for everyone. Joel is great, but this choice baffled me in the past and baffles me today. For the sort of software FogBugz is, they would have had a much simpler life with Java, Python, Ruby, even Perl. Despite all of Joel's insight into "making html sing", he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros "because that's what we know".
- stevoski 11y ago
  IIRC, Joel once wrote that he started coding FogBugz to learn some VBScript. Once you start a project in a language, there is a mighty amount of inertia to overcome to move to a different language...

w8rbt 11y ago

I'm not sure that it took them "a decade to realize the mistake". They realized it early on. It just took them awhile to fix it.

andyjohnson0 11y ago

I came away with a different impression to you: in the past there were good reasons to develop their own language; they recognised that those reasons no longer exist; they used modern tools to dig their way out from underneath the accumulated debt. Nowadays we have open-source runtimes, .net running on multiple platforms, and componentised tools like Roslyn. It is easy to forget that the .net tooling from 10+ years ago was much more limited. Writing you own language is an unusual approach, so descriptions of dealing with that kind of technical debt are rare. I thought this article was valuable and interesting.

danielweber 11y ago

Spending time working on Wasabi is only damaging to your career because of the current fad in hiring software developers that says "5+ years of Go development required." I work with at least 10 languages a week. There is zero chance of us hiring people with years of experience in all those. We want people who have used multiple languages, and someone who worked on compiling one language into another would completely satisfy that itch.

krallja 11y ago

Sorry about the weird phrasing. See df07's summary of where we ended up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9778724

dionidium 11y ago

> As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company I wouldn't worry about this at all. The choice of language on project n has never once negatively affected my work on project n + 1. As a programmer, my job has a lot more to do with solving problems (in the generic sense) than it does the tools I'm using to solve them.

brudgers 11y ago

Business software that provides business value is good software. FogCreek has been shipping Fogbugz to paying customers for fifteen years. If that's not success, it will do until success shows up. If that's a colossal error, where do I get one?