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Comment by KevinMS | Hacker News Reader

"One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your project."

Like writing a custom compiler for your web app?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore.

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"After he jumped that shark I don't read anything he writes anymore."

...how'd you get that quote then? Or did you only read enough to get something to complain about?

He wrote a multi-threaded C++ app to parse the html and return a random sentence?

Rhetorical question; What percentage of an article need to be read for the article as a whole to be classified as having been read?

I got it from another posting right before mine. I'm sorry I offended you and your beloved coding sensei.

But you've just confirmed the article here. Wasabi is exactly the duct tape he is talking about. FogBugz started as VBScript project, and when they needed to ship it for both Windows and Unix, instead of rewriting the system in two languages, they created a "compiler" to generate PHP code from existing code base. Later they added generation of .NET bytecode, and -- boom! -- instead of rewriting the whole FogBugz project they made it run on .NET runtime.

Wasabi is a duct tape.

As the lead maintainer of the Wasabi compiler project, it actually feels pretty good to have someone call it duct tape :)

Joel did not write, not imply, that he himself is a duct tape programmer.

In fact he made it quite clear in the last paragraph that these duct tape programmers are a rare breed. Maybe you never read that far though.

A custom "compiler" for me is a bit of a stretch. It's essentially a code generation tool where you code in a language similar to VBScript and it could output php or classic asp. It's not a custom C / C++ compiler or anything complicated like that.

So it's not completely crazy.

That article was from 2006. I'm sure that his (and many other people's) viewpoints change over the corse of 3 years.

Noup They still use Wasabe. He mentions it often on his podcast. And I don't think it is such a bad idea. It is simply a translator from one languate to another. Like GWT (Google Web Toolkit) They program in Java however the result is 'translated' to javascript. That is how the Gmail UI was made.

So no that crazy

Google only uses GWT for their internal projects. Gmail's UI doesn't use it.

You're right, though, it's not that crazy of an idea.

Isn't GWT used to build their wave client?

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