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Comment by lincolnq | Hacker News Reader

Uhm, if the guy down the hall WROTE the language, that's gonna be a hell of a lot more useful than posting to a mailing list. Especially if you can't post your secret source code, so instead you have to spend a lot of time coming up with a simple test case you can post which demonstrates the problem -- whereas with the guy down the hall, he's allowed to see the code.

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That's great if you work down the hall from the guy that wrote the language but unless you're talking about a niche in house language when it comes to web development you're talking about what half a dozen people that you can claim that against? And how many of those work at Google and the like?

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.

>> 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?

And what happens when the guy down the hall leaves the company?

Ah, well, then you're fucked. My point is not that you should consider it a good idea to make your own proprietary language, just that that situation can sometimes be a really good, productive one.

(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.)

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