The cost of an in-house programming language isn't in writing the compiler. It's training all your new team members in the language. It's documenting the language constructs, including corner cases. It's in not being able to go to Stack Overflow when you have problems. It's in every bug potentially being in either your application code, your compiler, or your runtime libraries, and needing to trace problems across this boundary. It's in integrating with 3rd-party libraries, and in not being able to use tooling developed for an existing mainstream language, and having to add another backend to every other DSL that compiles to a mainstream language.
All that said, I agree that if you're ever in a position to take a compiler course, do it. It's one of the most valuable courses I ever took, and really peels back the mystery on why programming languages are the way they are. It's just that the difference between wisdom and intelligence is in knowing when not to use that brilliant technique you know.
Which is precisely why I've never written a full compiler, even though I've written all the pieces many times.
For instance, instead of writing a parser, could you perhaps get away with just a direct JSON serialization of some AST? Do you really need to emit something, or will an interpreter do? So far I've never been so backed against the wall that I've actually needed a full compiler.
The interesting thing is that the more experience you get, the more alternatives you find to writing your own language. Could you use Ruby or Python as the front-end, much like Rails [2], Rake [3], or Bazel [4]? Could you build up a data-structure to express the computation, and then walk that data-structure with the Interpreter pattern? [5] Could you get away with a class library or framework, much like how Sawzall has been replaced by Flume [6] and Go libraries within Google?
In general, you want to use the tool with the least power that actually accomplishes your goals, because every increase in power is usually accompanied by an increase in complexity. There are a bunch of solutions with less power than a full programming language that can still get you most of the way there.
[1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
[3] http://rake.rubyforge.org/
[4] http://bazel.io/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Interpreter_pattern
[6] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~akella/CS838/F12/838-CloudPapers/F...
(If you're interested in goofing around with Starfighter, you're going to get an opportunity to get handheld through a lot of this stuff.)
I recognize that this would've been a huge leap for anyone in 2005, when 37signals was basically the only company doing small-business SaaS and the vast majority of companies insisted that with any software they buy, they actually buy it and the source code and data sit within the company firewall. Heck, when Heroku came out in 2007 I was like "Who the hell would use this, turning over all of their source code to some unnamed startup?"
But looking at how the industry's evolved, that's pretty much the only way they could've stayed relevant. Many companies don't even have physical servers anymore. That's the way FogBugz did evolve, eventually, but they were late getting there and had to back out all the existing Wasabi code and fixes they made for it to be easily deployable (which was one of their core differentiators, IIRC; they were much easier to setup than Bugzilla or other competitors).
It makes me appreciate how tough the job is for CEOs like Larry Page or Steve Jobs, who have managed to stay at the leading edge of the industry for years. Larry was pretty insane for buying a small mobile phone startup called Android in 2005, but it turned out to be worth billions eventually.
1. The primary product of many companies got too large to deploy on their own server farms, and so they started moving toward AWS etc. for scalable hosting. Once your product is in the cloud, it makes sense to deploy your supporting infrastructure & tooling there as well, because otherwise you're paying the support, hosting, & sysadmin costs for just your non-critical corporate infrastructure.
2. Bandwidth became a non-issue. In the 1990s there was a very measurable difference between 10BaseT internally vs. an ISDN line to your hosting provider. In the 2010s, there's little practical difference between gigabit Ethernet vs. 10M broadband.
3. HTTPS became ubiquitous, taking care of many security risks.
4. AJAX enabled rich UIs, which previously would've required desktop apps.
5. Employees started to blur the line between work and home, leading to demand for work services that could be used, encrypted, from a user's home network. VPNs were a huge PITA to set up. This was a big issue for much of the early 2000s; one of my employers made some clever network software to punch through corporate firewalls with a minimum of configuration.
6. Development speed increased. SaaS companies could push new versions of their product faster, react to customer feedback quicker, and generally deliver better service. Because all customer interactions go through the company's servers (where they can be logged), they have much better information about how people are using their products. Deployed services were left in the dust.
tl;dr: #1-4 made lots of businesses go "Why not?", while #5 and #6 made them go "Yessss."
It's interesting that many of the arguments about why you should not use SaaS businesses now (like privacy and security, and lack of ownership) were relatively minor reasons then. I do kinda wish (in an abstract way) that something like Sandstorm would catch on, but I think they may be early: SaaS just isn't that painful, and until we have a major shake-out where a lot of businesses get taken out because their dependencies go down, it seems unlikely that it will become so. Or the other way this could play out is that a new powerful computing platform comes out that lets you do things that aren't possible with thin clients, and you see a rush back to the client for functionality.
The monthly bills for small purchases of SaaS fits on what could be expensed on a corporate card. By the time IT gets wind, the product has already infiltrated the organization. If there's a very large up front cost, then IT is involved, you need a formal RFP process, lots of people weigh in, those opposed to the purchase can try and block it... As soon as "Put it on the corporate card" became viable, power moved back to the business units.
Granted, it may take a while to convince IT people that this is OK, but fundamentally they have every reason to prefer this over people cheating with SaaS.
I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly, but FogBugz On Demand was launched in 2007. Was that really late for SaaS?
They did learn from this, as you can see by the very different paths StackExchange and Trello are on.
The developer tools market changed from one with very few network effects to one with a large network effect around 2010. The drivers for these were GitHub, meetups, forums like Hacker News, and just its general growth - they made coding social. When I started programming professionally in 2000, each company basically decided on a bugtracker and version control system independently, and it didn't matter what every other company did. By 2015, most new companies just use git, they host on GitHub, and if they don't do this, they're at a strong disadvantage when recruiting & training up developers, because that's what much of the workforce uses.
Interestingly, both GitHub and Atlassian resisted taking investment for many years - GitHub was founded in 2007 and took its first investment in 2012, while Atlassian was founded in 2002 and took its first investment in 2010.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
Coffeescript has a similar name to Javascript, so you can quickly draw an association between the two.
The name Wasabi doesn't have an obvious connection to the VBScript that it's based on, which seems to be the cause of people talking about writing a whole new language, etc.
Thistle -> FogBasic -> BC3k -> Wasabi
1. compilers have bugs
2. it really sucks not knowing if a bug is in your code or in your compiler
3. it sucks not having a source-level debugger
I won't categorically reject the idea, for instance I think Facebook writing their HipHop compiler was completely defensible. But you need people with compiler experience, and people who know the pain of working with crappy, undocumented, buggy toolchains to make that decision, not people who once took a compiler course.
> Fun fact: Wasabi has more unit tests than FogBugz.
> It’s fully debuggable in Visual Studio. Breakpoints, variable inspection, single stepping, the whole enchilada.
But the whole post makes it clear that working in Wasabi wasn't nearly as difficult as you think.
* Five, actually, and contributed to a sixth
Documentation? None Online community? None Transferability of skillset? None, apart from knowing how compilers work. Makes for good nerd conversation, but that's it.
Writing your own toolchain is almost as bad. I've seen multiple talented people leave companies I've worked at when they were forced to build and maintain horrible tools for the in-house ecosystem. Some too-big-for-his-britches second-system-as-a-first-system ass had written them, and everybody else got stuck with it.
As the other commenter noted, this seems like epitome of bad software engineering and I'm surprised employees put up with it if they were any good.
EDIT: I learned to program in assembly, so compilers didn't seem super mysterious to me as they are for someone who learns Java first perhaps.
I think the old business adage about "In-source your core competencies, outsource everything else" applies here. If you derive a big competitive advantage from having a proprietary database or proprietary template, and it generates enough revenue to afford a dedicated team of experts to maintain it, build it. But if you have a bunch of smart & motivated developers who can build a proprietary database, but your product isn't databases or templates and your core differentiator isn't the performance or query patterns you get from building it yourself? Put them to work improving the product, and work with the infrastructure that other firms have built already.
If you have great people building the software, or at least competent ones, and you have competent users, you might succeed, maybe. But that's assuming you have a maintenance plan and a roadmap, which most software companies do not. Maintain software? YOLO! What happens when you have a bunch of morons using and maintaining the software?
In short, computer science in industry is largely practiced as shamanism by people who cannot engineer their way out of a crackerjack box.
According to this link from another response by someone who worked on Wasabi: http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/technical-debt-and-tacki...
Some choice quotes:
“Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript.”
and
“It’s fully debuggable in Visual Studio. Breakpoints, variable inspection, single stepping, the whole enchilada. It’s just .NET under the covers.”
So not really a new language per se, sounds more like they just home-brewed some steroids for VBScript.
Well, I can see how you might struggle there ;-)
Good natured snarks about spelling aside, part of the issue is that writing, documenting and maintaining your own language is only hard if your toolchain sucks.
If you're interested in writing a specialized language to solve a particular problem, take a look at PEG for JS, and either Racket or Common Lisp (the latter if you need native compilation).
I've recently been involved in the design and implementation of an English-like language for the expression of business domain concepts in web apps. It's a great approach if done thoughtfully and professionally.
That's probably the key, actually. The horror stories we hear are of the bad examples. And we all know that shitty tools, weak languages and bad documentation can come out of large software companies as commercial products as well.
Do you think a good compiler course would prepare the student to do a project with the scope and complexity of Wasabi? For one project, I wrote an interpreter for a little domain-specific language, then later reworked that interpreter into an on-the-fly compiler (to Lua, to avoid double interpretation). But that's a long way from writing a compiler for a general-purpose language, that can do global type inference and produce human-readable output in a target language that's fairly different from the original VBScript (if not Wasabi itself).
The trickiest bit of Wasabi is the type inference, which I admit is not "production-ready" (or "good code") because we basically invented it from scratch. If I were to do it now, I would know just enough to realize that I need to read about Hindley-Milner rather than reinvent the wheel.
Producing human-readable output is an exercise in tedium and bookkeeping, not any particular amount of skill or brilliance.
Compilers just aren't that magically hard and difficult. I'll cop to not having written a true compiler yet but I've written a number of interpreters, and I've written all the pieces several times (compile to AST, interpret, serialize back out, just never had the whole shebang needed at once).
If you're reading this, and you're still in a position where you can take a compilers course, take it! It's one of the most brutally pragmatic courses in the whole of computer science and it's a shame how it's withered. (Even if, like me, you'll probably write more interpreters than compilers. And nowadays you really ought to have a good reason not to pick an existing serialization off-the-shelf. But it's still useful stuff.) It's one of those things that is the difference between a wizard and a code monkey.
(If I said that too concisely for your tastes, see: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food... )