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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you could take this comment, make very minimal tweaks, and deploy it in any language-war debate. "They succeeded with Golang, but for all the wrong reasons. They gained an early advantage but bought themselves 10 years of technical debt that a more modern cross-platform language would have spared them".

And I feel like when you get to the point where the best arguments you can make against something are isomorphic to the arguments you'd make against mainstream languages in language-war debates, that's a win condition.

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Sure, FogCreek thought it was a good idea at the time, but over the years it became a significant burden, to the point they had dedicated staff working on just keeping Wasabi alive. Time was even spent writing an internally distributed book about the caveats of the language!

I know you will dismiss this as "routine", but it's not...

For a small company, this is an enormous waste of time, money, and energy.

A big company like Google or Microsoft can afford to throw developers by the dozen at internal proprietary languages and not even blink -- but according to the article, FogCreek did blink every time they had to dedicate time to fixing it. It took time, money, and energy away from their core business - making software.

That's a lose condition.

FogCreek should have bit the bullet and re-wrote their application in an open, standardized cross-platform system. They would have been able to spend zero time worrying about the language, and 100% of their time worrying about their application. They could hire engineers off the street and have them produce in days-to-weeks instead of weeks-to-months. They would have saved themselves an enormous amount of time, money, and energy invested in a language that is now dead anyway.

It may have seemed like a good choice back when the decision was made, but in hindsight it appears to have been a very poor, short-sighted choice.

> FogCreek should have bit the bullet and re-wrote their application in an open, standardized cross-platform system.

Ah, so you happen to know better than Joel how much resources they had available at the time, how long the rewrite would have taken, how much it would have affected their ability to ship new features?

Fog Creek was a much smaller company back when they wrote Wasabi. Postponing the rewrite until they had more resources to spare was probably a good decision.

> For a small company, this is an enormous waste of time, money, and energy.

I think you have this backwards. A small company that writes a compiler and loses a few weeks of dev time per year survives for a decade, while spinning up various new products.

In another world, a small company rewrites its only source of revenue. 18 months later, they release the rewrite with zero new features and a chunk of new bugs and promptly die, because who's going to buy a product that spends a year and a half going backwards?

I think his point can be summarized as "it's better to have to maintain your software than to have to maintain your software and the compiler for it", which is hard to argue against.

Then again, given that they had the codebase already, writing their own transpiler sounds like it was the best option at the time.

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