<story><title>Killing Off Wasabi</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>So in a way, the original mistake was made even before FogBasic&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x27;ve learnt their lesson so well that they&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s insight into &amp;quot;making html sing&amp;quot;, he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros &amp;quot;because that&amp;#x27;s what we know&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s no .Net or Mono, and all their code is written in old [edit:] VBScript).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a great example of path dependency however.&lt;p&gt;BTW: Red Hat has been here too.  We converted a huge app from .Net to Java by using some translation software: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lpeer.blogspot.co.uk&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;switching-from-c-to-java.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lpeer.blogspot.co.uk&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;switching-from-c-to-java...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>zak_mc_kracken</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it&amp;#x27;s at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsky&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I also find this kind of phrasing weird:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slantyyz</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; : by buying into the wonderful MS ecosystem&lt;p&gt;Remember the age of Fogbugz. It was initially released in 2000.&lt;p&gt;MS Windows was by far the dominant operating system. Virtualization was still in its early stages, and mostly at the desktop level. Linux was still growing in the server market but not dominant as it is today.&lt;p&gt;And what is exactly is wrong with the MS ecosystem if you&amp;#x27;re targeting enterprise? There are still a lot of businesses that work exclusively with Windows servers with IT managers that don&amp;#x27;t want the headache of having Linux servers.&lt;p&gt;Enterprise software tends to be a notch or two below consumer software in the &amp;quot;it just works department&amp;quot;, and my experience with deploying Java based enterprise software was pretty negative. In 2000, not a lot of people were using Ruby, Python or Perl for enterprise web apps. It was mostly ASP and JSP back then.</text></comment>
<story><title>Killing Off Wasabi</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>toyg</author><text>So in a way, the original mistake was made even before FogBasic&amp;#x2F;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&amp;#x27;ve learnt their lesson so well that they&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s insight into &amp;quot;making html sing&amp;quot;, he behaved like an accountant building humongous Excel macros &amp;quot;because that&amp;#x27;s what we know&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>rwmj</author><text>It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s no .Net or Mono, and all their code is written in old [edit:] VBScript).&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a great example of path dependency however.&lt;p&gt;BTW: Red Hat has been here too.  We converted a huge app from .Net to Java by using some translation software: &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lpeer.blogspot.co.uk&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;switching-from-c-to-java.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lpeer.blogspot.co.uk&amp;#x2F;2010&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;switching-from-c-to-java...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>zak_mc_kracken</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it&amp;#x27;s at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsky&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I also find this kind of phrasing weird:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bryanlarsen</author><text>The difference this time is that C# is now open source.   Sure, C# is still essentially Microsoft-only, but there are enough users that if Microsoft abandoned it, it&amp;#x27;s fairly certain that others would be there to pick up the pieces.</text></comment>