It seems like a spectacular success story.

I'd say the actual experience is somewhere in between. Sure it enabled them to support client requests to be cross platform and proved useful for a very long time, but what was the broader opportunity cost? Did supporting this proprietary infrastructure eat up resources and prevent them from exploring other ideas? Probably.

This whole story is a fabulous insight into software development for business over the long-term.

The reality though is that line-for-line, a transpiler is probably not much harder to write than a serious report generation tool. I agree with the commenter upthread, who thinks this is a result of people simply never having tried to write a compiler before.

It might be, but for what many would argue are the wrong reasons, maybe even unnecessary.

> This is an internal language designed as an incremental improvement over VB that gave them cross-platform common codebase.

The problem is that at the time, there was already several cross-platform technologies in existence, many of which were being developed in the open. Utilizing one of these technologies would have allowed FogCreek to focus on what they do best, make software. Instead, they took a proprietary uni-platform language and attempted all on their own to make it cross-platform capable - which led to years of maintainability issues.

> It lasted 10 years

They gained an early advantage of not having to throw out the codebase and start over, yet they bought themselves 10 years of technical debt which continued to pose a burden on the small company. Many would argue that biting the bullet early on and switching to an open, community-driven cross-platform language/environment would have yielded much more return on the initial investment.

> When they transitioned off of it, they did it not with a rewrite, but with mechanical translation

Yes, that is an achievement, but again, for the wrong reasons.

And I feel like when you get to the point where the best arguments you can make against something are isomorphic to the arguments you'd make against mainstream languages in language-war debates, that's a win condition.

I know you will dismiss this as "routine", but it's not...

For a small company, this is an enormous waste of time, money, and energy.

A big company like Google or Microsoft can afford to throw developers by the dozen at internal proprietary languages and not even blink -- but according to the article, FogCreek did blink every time they had to dedicate time to fixing it. It took time, money, and energy away from their core business - making software.

That's a lose condition.

FogCreek should have bit the bullet and re-wrote their application in an open, standardized cross-platform system. They would have been able to spend zero time worrying about the language, and 100% of their time worrying about their application. They could hire engineers off the street and have them produce in days-to-weeks instead of weeks-to-months. They would have saved themselves an enormous amount of time, money, and energy invested in a language that is now dead anyway.

It may have seemed like a good choice back when the decision was made, but in hindsight it appears to have been a very poor, short-sighted choice.

I think you have this backwards. A small company that writes a compiler and loses a few weeks of dev time per year survives for a decade, while spinning up various new products.

In another world, a small company rewrites its only source of revenue. 18 months later, they release the rewrite with zero new features and a chunk of new bugs and promptly die, because who's going to buy a product that spends a year and a half going backwards?

Ah, so you happen to know better than Joel how much resources they had available at the time, how long the rewrite would have taken, how much it would have affected their ability to ship new features?

Fog Creek was a much smaller company back when they wrote Wasabi. Postponing the rewrite until they had more resources to spare was probably a good decision.

Then again, given that they had the codebase already, writing their own transpiler sounds like it was the best option at the time.

FogBugz wasn't written in any of those languages though. And it isn't like Spolsky's "never rewrite from scratch" views are unknown here.

I'm curious if anybody on this thread who has written more than three or four compilers/parsers would agree with you.

Depending on the task, the only solution to some problems is to write a custom/proprietary language (whether it's closed source, of course, is up to the company).

Is a bug tracker one of those problems?

But "bug tracker" is not the problem that was being solved.

The problem was taking a big pile of legacy code and translating it to more than one platform vs rewriting the entire app from scratch in a new language that was cross platform.

It just happened that the legacy code was for a bug tracker, but it could have been for anything.

Really?

I don't think so, having done this once, to the great success of the company. They also wrote their own database. The compiler was maintained by a team long after I left the company.

Software is hard. There are more interesting, and hard, problems than pushing the value of a field from one subsystem to the other.

/me deactivates snark mode

I see the issue exactly the other way around.

If you can build a domain specific language that lets you express concepts in a clear way free of boilerplate or conceptual hackery (ORMs, for example) you will wind up with a much lighter maintenance load than the equivalent functionality built on an off the shelf framework.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using the two as appropriate. Simple CRUD app? Rails. Need to express a very complex domain in a readable, easily maintained form? Custom language time.