Killing Off Wasabi
It's always struck me as extremely bizarre that a company that regularly advertises that it's at the bleeding edge of software engineering practices (see Spolsky's numerous blog posts on the topic) made such a colossal error as writing their own language, and that it took them a decade to realize this mistake.<p>I also find this kind of phrasing weird:<p>> The people who wrote the original Wasabi compiler moved on for one reason or another. Some married partners who lived elsewhere; others went over to work on other products from Fog Creek.<p>It's like the author of this article goes out of their ways to avoid saying that some people left the company, period. It also wouldn't surprise me if some of these defections were caused by Wasabi itself. As a software engineer, you quickly start wondering how wise it is to spend years learning a language that will be of no use once you leave your current company (yet another reason why rolling your own language as a critical part of your product is a terrible idea).