This just blew me away. Joel is living on another planet if he thinks that FogzBugs is a unique enough product to warrant building a custom compiler. What a nut.
And the reasons he states for doing it… uhh, Java?
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on Sep 1st, 2006 at 10:49 pm
I don’t think Joel’s on crack, I think he’s just being deceptive (possibly to himself).
From what I can tell it’s revisionist history.
The way he writes his article, you’d think they started out with a blank slate and said “What’s the best way to write a webapp that runs on 2 platforms. Oh, I know let’s write our own VBScript->ASP/PHP compiler and then extends VBScript with additional features…“
The reality is (as best I can tell) that they wrote an ASP webapp using VBScript sold it on windows and then decided they needed a unix version. Now the question is “What’s the best way to take an existing webapp written in VBScript and make it run on unix without pissing off all our existing windows customers?“
For that question a VBS->PHP compiler is a reasonable option. If he’d switched to java he would have had to tell all his existing clients that the new version requires them to install a servlet engine for IIS and there’s a big risk that they’ll decide it’s too hard and never upgrade.
And once you’ve got your own compiler, and you want to fool yourself into believing that writing a bug tracking app is akin to rocket science, then you simple have to add lambdas to your language. That way you can still look cool and claim to hire the top 1% of people while writing bug tracking software in VBS.
Don’t forget that Joel still focuses on ISVs. The target audience for FogBugz seems to be small software vendors. Atlassian seem to be focusing more on the workgroups market. I suspect most JIRA users are only using it within their intranet.
on Sep 2nd, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Tim,
Nice comments – though I would say that “And once you’ve got your own compiler, and you want to fool yourself into believing that writing a bug tracking app is akin to rocket science” is about the same thing as “on crack”
on Sep 3rd, 2006 at 11:05 am
Thats the problem when you use Microsoft stuff and i pretty much think that Joels business nearly completely runs on Microsoft toolings and languages. I am customer of Fogbugz, so i was of course aware of that before that entry.