Joel, you have got to be kidding

Joel seems to “play it safe” … then goes off the deep end of irony in his final paragraph:

“FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in C#.”

Fortunately DHH saved me some minutes of typing about it, with a scathing commentary.

Over at Oasis Digital we use both common tools (.NET, Java, PHP, C, Delphi, etc.) and more unusual ones (Lua, Prolog, Ruby, sorry no Lisp yet), so I believe that puts us in the DHH and Paul Graham camp: If you want to win, you must be willing to do something different from the pack… such as, in an extreme case, creating your own language optimized for the task at hand, whether in the form of Lisp macros or a C# compiler for Wasabi.