Via Less is Better, David Heinemeir Hansson gets the Board of Education out for Joel Spolsky - read the whole thing, it's well worth it. I love his summary:

So Joel and friends invented their own language, which has to reasonably compile to three and a half different ones. Yes, they're building their Serious Business Stuff application on a 1-off, closed language. So please do as I say, not as I do, dammit. And pick something mainstream and "safe".

I swear I couldn't make this stuff up even if I tried. Joel, you're my new hero of irony. And as soon as you start selling those t-shirts with "Serious Business Stuff", I got green ready to flow. Short of that, I'd take a red teddy bear with the embroidering "Someone is Going to Get Fired".

Oh, and let me address something that I wasn't specific about in my post on this - his FUD on Smalltalk (and Lisp, Ruby, etc)

Last summer when we had a group of interns build Copilot, we had to decide what language to use for new code. I know that typically on new projects there's a long evaluation period where you decide what technology to use, along with lots of debates that include some crazy person actually wasting quite a lot of time evaluating Squeak and Lisp and OCaml and lots of other languages which are totally, truly brilliant programming languages worthy of great praise, but just don't have the gigantic ecosystem you need around them if you want to develop web software.

So let me get this straight, Joel: having one of your developers build a custom language (bus count: 1) is a better idea (with a bigger "ecosystem") than using Smalltalk? Or Lisp? Or Ruby? Sheesh, I'd call that stupid, but I'd be insulting all the stupid people that way. This goes down from stupid, straight into stoooopid.

Let me know how things work out on that when your Wasabi guy moves on to the next great opportunity.

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