Surprisingly Turing-Complete
I have taken to calling certain features "Turing Complete" (in a joking-but-not-really way). Most often they are seeking some kind of enterprise customizability: "workflow", survey skip logic, custom reports, white labeling, etc.---basically the same places where you risk falling into the Inner Platform Effect trap. I'm curious how other people tackle requests for these. Usually it starts out with something basic ("email the admin if it's two weeks late",  "skip this page if they answer that way", "use the most-recently entered birthday to compute age in years and months", "let people change the logo"), but I can see where it's going.It seems to me you can either field these requests as they come in and get a hodge-podge of strangely-interacting features, or you can build some kind of general-purpose scriptability from the start. (Or you can follow the iPhone and 37 Signals and do it one way only, but often that is not an option.) So I've started to wonder about simply embedding a Javascript interpreter with access to a well-defined API into your application objects. Then people can do whatever they want! Of course this assumes savvy users, perhaps 90% an internal "services" team. But JS is easy to embed, e.g. therubyracer, was designed to be secure (no network/file/shell access), and is the most widely-known of all programming languages. What do other people think? Crazy?