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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman

Beautiful.

Spolsky seems to be a less fashionable idol than he was when I started to become interested in startups. In the context of programming AND startups, his opinions have much more weight to me than XP proponents'.

Joel has created a successful company that is apparently fun to work in, have shipped several working and commercially successful products and made a service for human-kind by designing and successfully launching programming Q&A site that doesn't suck. Plus his writings inspired a generation of programmers to start companies, just like PG's writings did later.

Contrast this with Extreme Programming that OP embraces as a third option compared to duct tape programming vs analysis-paralysis. I was very excited about XP when I was young and inexperienced programmer, but nowadays XP sounds much more snake-oil salesmanship to me than Joel's opinions. Did original XP gang work in startup like environments, or were they actually solving problems (payroll systems) that they and many others had already solved? And Kent Beck seems to be still working on jUnit (and trying to find a way to monetize it), not shipping new products.

My kudos goes to Joel and duct tape programmers around the world.

Let us never forget that the project XP originated with, Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System, never actually shipped.

Another Ron Jeffries special. Him and Uncle Bob, do the opposite of what they say and you'll do fine.

Joel seems to talk a lot of sense but this is tempered for me by two things. 1) no-one I know uses any of his products and 2) I have a hard time believing he really is able to attract the top talent to work on a project management tool written in VB.

It's written in ASP.NET, not VB.

Really? Since when?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic"

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript)

http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"

I love that first article; after many paragraphs extolling the "safe" choices, at the end he casually slips in that he's actually using a language that no-one else in the world is.

Nevertheless, Wasabi is to VB as Arc is to Lisp.

I'm totally wrong. I meant to write .NET (not ASP.NET) and .NET isn't even a language, so I'm doubly wrong. It's probably been four years since I've touched the code :\

It isn't written in VB and never was. In 2000 it was written in classic ASP (vbscript) and c++. Probably a few years after that it was converted to Wasabi, which at the time was very close to VBScript, but is now equivalent to C#. For the last few years it is shipped as a .NET product on both windows and unix, and the /Dev.html page you cited is accurate. (The articles you cited from four years ago aren't accurate anymore).

http://xkcd.com/386/

1 I have used and paid to use Fogbugz. I've used JIRA as well, and I would choose Fogbugz over JIRA any day, despite the silly name. Since I've gone independent, I use the free version of hosted Fogbugz (Fog Creek is kind enough to offer it for free for independents and startups).

--edit it's free for students too

2 I'm of the opinion that truly top talent doesn't care about the language. It's the programming problems they care about. Fogbugz does some non trivial stuff like evidence based scheduling. I'm sure some top programmers would find that interesting, regardless of whether it's programmed in a vb-like syntax or not.

Having said that, Joel says a lot of things, some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. It's the Internet. Opinions are plentiful, and we're all free to agree or disagree.

Why is this a valid rebuttal?

I don't agree with everything Joel says, and I definitely find the StackExchange marketing approach flawed at best, but I've been using Fogbugz for quite some time, and it is far from being horrible software. I would take it over JIRA any day.

Yes, Joel is an Internet brand. His blog entries are designed to get eyeballs by being opinionated. But he does have a legitimate development background. You can't dismiss his opinion outright because he sells bug tracking software.

I immediately found the quote "never take software advice from a bug tracking system salesman" an ad-hominem attack. It doesn't address at all why the advice would be bad.

I imagine he's trying to suggest it is in Joel's best interest for people to have buggy code so he can sell more bug tracking software. It doesn't sound like a very good argument, but I think it's supposed to be a joke.

yes, it is a joke. and a teeny-tiny bite of prophecy.

and, by the way, the tweet is correct, i had said it before. http://twitter.com/mhinze/status/2485789965 - months before this brouhaha.

It is not an attack towards person. It simply points that a guy selling bug tracking system makes his living from people having bugs in their software.

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