<story><title>Killing Off Wasabi</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alupis</author><text>It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; usually a &amp;quot;colossal error&amp;quot; to write your own in-house closed-source&amp;#x2F;proprietary language, no matter how small or large the language is.&lt;p&gt;The main reason is exactly as the article states, maintainability.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As time wore on, our technical debt finally began to come due. Compilers like Wasabi and their associated runtime libraries are highly complex pieces of software. We hadn’t open-sourced it, so this meant any investment had to be done by us at the expense of our main revenue-generating products. While we were busy working on exciting new things, Wasabi stagnated. It was a huge dependency that required a full-time developer — not cheap for a company of our size. It occasionally barfed on a piece of code that was completely reasonable to humans. It was slow to compile. Visual Studio wasn’t able to easily edit or attach a debugger to FogBugz. Just documenting it was a chore</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny because what got me is how &lt;i&gt;dumb&lt;/i&gt; it sounded: the words &amp;quot;such a colossal error as writing their own language&amp;quot; made me think &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s the kind of thing a mid-level IT manager at an insurance company would say&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>hitekker</author><text>I imagine most people upvoted because it sounded smart.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s fascinating how easily cruelty can be popularized by using the right, nice-sounding words. Coating&amp;#x2F;mask your bile in a rhetoric popular with a community, indirectly imply some terrible things, perhaps obfuscate anything that could raise any uncomfortable, thoughtful questions, and presto! You&amp;#x27;ll have the right set-up to manufacture consensus.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;The second half of your comment transitions from weird to mean-spirited, as you begin speculating about people you don&amp;#x27;t know and their reasons for changing jobs. I&amp;#x27;m a little confused as to why you&amp;#x27;ve been voted up so high on the page.</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>tptacek</author><text>What am I missing? This is an internal language designed as an incremental improvement over VB that gave them cross-platform common codebase. It lasted 10 years: that&amp;#x27;s 19,932 in SaaS years. When they transitioned off of it, they did it not with a rewrite, but with &lt;i&gt;mechanical translation&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;It seems like a spectacular success story.</text></comment>
<story><title>Killing Off Wasabi</title><url>http://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Alupis</author><text>It &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; usually a &amp;quot;colossal error&amp;quot; to write your own in-house closed-source&amp;#x2F;proprietary language, no matter how small or large the language is.&lt;p&gt;The main reason is exactly as the article states, maintainability.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; As time wore on, our technical debt finally began to come due. Compilers like Wasabi and their associated runtime libraries are highly complex pieces of software. We hadn’t open-sourced it, so this meant any investment had to be done by us at the expense of our main revenue-generating products. While we were busy working on exciting new things, Wasabi stagnated. It was a huge dependency that required a full-time developer — not cheap for a company of our size. It occasionally barfed on a piece of code that was completely reasonable to humans. It was slow to compile. Visual Studio wasn’t able to easily edit or attach a debugger to FogBugz. Just documenting it was a chore</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny because what got me is how &lt;i&gt;dumb&lt;/i&gt; it sounded: the words &amp;quot;such a colossal error as writing their own language&amp;quot; made me think &amp;quot;that&amp;#x27;s the kind of thing a mid-level IT manager at an insurance company would say&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>hitekker</author><text>I imagine most people upvoted because it sounded smart.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s fascinating how easily cruelty can be popularized by using the right, nice-sounding words. Coating&amp;#x2F;mask your bile in a rhetoric popular with a community, indirectly imply some terrible things, perhaps obfuscate anything that could raise any uncomfortable, thoughtful questions, and presto! You&amp;#x27;ll have the right set-up to manufacture consensus.</text></item><item><author>tptacek</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;The second half of your comment transitions from weird to mean-spirited, as you begin speculating about people you don&amp;#x27;t know and their reasons for changing jobs. I&amp;#x27;m a little confused as to why you&amp;#x27;ve been voted up so high on the page.</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>ghshephard</author><text>&amp;quot;It is usually a &amp;quot;colossal error&amp;quot; to write your own in-house closed-source&amp;#x2F;proprietary language&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m curious if anybody on this thread who has written more than three or four compilers&amp;#x2F;parsers would agree with you.&lt;p&gt;Depending on the task, the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; solution to some problems is to write a custom&amp;#x2F;proprietary language (whether it&amp;#x27;s closed source, of course, is up to the company).</text></comment>