So it converts PHP into C++?!? Woaw.
Didn't people accuse Joel Spolsky of jumping the shark for doing that kind of thing (Wasabi script => php or vbscript).
.....wait this means that Wasabi can now technically convert into C++! :D
Didn't people accuse Joel Spolsky of jumping the shark for doing that kind of thing (Wasabi script => php or vbscript).
.....wait this means that Wasabi can now technically convert into C++! :D
Facebook compiles from a "sane" language (PHP) to a less sane, but twice as fast language (C++). The alternative was to get their devs to work in C++, which they decided was an unattractive solution -- this seems reasonable.
It's obvious that wasabi has been good to Fog Creek, but that doesn't make it a sane decision, regardless of the quality of the syntax and semantics of the language itself.
>> Need to find a PHP developer? No problem.
Not being able to hire just anyone to code for you is a good thing just as much as it is bad. It means you're going to have some pretty bright people working for you, which apparently is something Fog Creek values and can afford to do.
> Want a PHP IDE? No problem.
Most hackers have their own preferred editors anyways, and Emacs/vi/etc work well with any language if that's the editor you're experienced with.
>> A large community to handle bugs and any future development? Yes.
Again, that's a hindrance just as much as it is a benefit. If you need to make a change or fix a bug in the language, you're going to have much better luck if you know a bunch of people who are intimately familiar with how that language works, especially if their right down the hall from you.
Not that it matters anyhow for most roles you neither need nor can afford to hire the best and brightest away from their current role which they probably love a lot(being the best gives you the ability to choose great places to work). So unless you're looking for a tech lead you're going to be looking for great, much better than average but not specifically the best and for those conditions PHP will give you a much larger developer base to choose from every day of the week.
As for the last point I think you're really reaching here to find a negative. A large community to handle bugs a hindrance? Seriously? And your alternative ideal solution is some people down the hall in your office that know how to use the language well?
The vast majority of people will never have the opportunity to be down the hall from that guy and for the vast majority of people a large helpful community will be infinitely more valuable.
Which means what to Fog Creek?
(I'm dealing with this in my work -- we use a proprietary internal scripting language, and the guy who wrote it is not around. I'm slowly becoming the local expert on the language -- very slowly, though, because opportunities to work on it don't come up too often.)
P.S. If the company you're applying to is upset by you having worked in a proprietary language, they're hiring for the wrong things.
In a perfect world, sure. But in the real world, the guy with actual experience in the language/framework used gets an interview first. Then the guy with experience in any language/framework the interviewer immediately recognizes as relevant. Then the guy with experience in something so obscure it's not even on Wikipedia (which Wasabi wouldn't be had Joel and Fog Creek not been famous).
If there's some company out there that doesn't want to hire people capable of writing their own compilers to more easily add cross-platform support to their software the guys at Fog Creek aren't going to want to work there anyway.
If they'd been working in vanilla VBScript in 2010, it'd be even more insane, and also, I think Joel would have some serious problems holding on to employees.
Maybe it could even compile itself on the fly to machine code to continually optimize itself!
C++ is much faster than PHP, not just twice as fast.
If a higher-level language lets you implement a smarter algorithm, your program will run faster.
We can say that "C++ is faster than PHP", because most, if not all, programs using the same algorithms will run faster when written in C++ and compiled to native code.
> If a higher-level language lets you implement a smarter algorithm, your program will run faster.
PHP is generally easier to master than C++, but both are high level enough to provide adequate tools to write efficient algorithms with comparable amount of effort, provided one is competent with the language at hand.
So you're basically against the use of Domain Specific Languages on the whole? Or only those whose syntax you don't like?
Hire based on experience with a specific paradigm. OO. Functional. Etc. Or experience with a specific domain problem. Compilers. DSLs. Operating Systems. Etc.
Fog Creek rewrote everything in a brand new language they invented that compiles down into multiple other languages.
So, in actuality, the projects are the exact opposite of each other.
Wasabi did extend VBScript to add objects and other language features, which were gradually incorporated into the code base, but just on changes going forward.
So, really, it is almost exactly the same thing.
Both companies had huge investments in a code base and found a geeky way to keep their code base while reaping modern benefits.
Most things are toys compared to face book, Google or Twitter. That doesn't make them pointless.
Wasabi is an app-specific dialect of VBScript used by one company to deploy a bug tracker to small teams. HipHop is a general-purpose PHP compiler whose output is used at scale by the world's largest social networking site.
I can write a file system that will work fine on my computer, with my workload, and maybe even write an essay about how productive that makes me. But I don't think you'd want to install it.
These two projects are not in the same league - they're not even in the same sport - and so I am baffled to see Wasabi come up in this thread at all.
In this case, your tone.
Those earlier comments are comparing the strategy that Fog Creek took versus the one that Facebook has taken. The strategies are similar, and so the comparison makes sense.
It should be noted that Wasabi is a general purpose programming language. It is Turing complete (up to relatively trivial finite-memory issues, just like any other general purpose programming language). Like C, for example. It should also be noted that Wasabi is a .NET language. It has full access to the .NET Framework and all of its classes.
One could use Wasabi to write a C compiler.
[NB: I am a Fog Creek developer, working on the FogBugz team.]
What evidence do you have that Wasabi is a toy? I seriously doubt you have any knowledge on the topic either way.
Wasabi started out as a VBScript -> PHP compiler, allowing us to keep the existing FogBugz source, but run it on Unix and Linux, where ASP wasn't available. Once we had that, it hit us that it'd be pretty easy to add a VBScript -> VBScript compiler, at which point we could add language extensions. So we did. This allowed new code to take advantage of things like macros, better declaration syntax, lambdas and so on, without rewriting any existing code. Finally, because it was clear that ASP was dead, and specifically because we didn't want to rewrite FogBugz from scratch, we modified Wasabi to target .NET.
The whole point of Wasabi was to avoid rewriting FogBugz to support other platforms and technologies. I have no idea where you got the idea we rewrote the entire program; if we'd done that, we'd have just done it in C#.
I think the mythology of Wasabi has become larger than life and pretty heavily distorted.
Joey Lawrence?!