This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: Was Joel's Wasabi a joke?
Feed Title: Loud Thinking
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Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp
It seems quite a lot of people assume that Joel's Wasabi language was or is a joke. I sure hope so too, but I really don't think it is. If I had just read his Language Wars piece, I probably would have chalked Wasabi up as a joke. The benefit of the doubt would have made me err on the side of sanity.
But I happened to remember an interview that Doug Kaye from IT Conversations did with Joel about a year ago. In this episode, Joel talks about the wonders of building FogBugz on technology that he controls. Namely VBScript. He explains how they built a compiler for VBScript that emits PHP and that they have plans for extending the compiler for future hot targets.
I think that's what eventually turned into Wasabi, although the name itself may indeed be a joke. Even better, he recommends this as a good strategy for other companies, presumably in the web-application space (since all of this talk is stemming from his FogBugz experience). Among other things, he says:
We feel we've built technology on a platform that we, to some extent, control... and that's really what you should be doing if you're trying to make technology that you're going to build a company on.
(For those listening along, this discussion starts at about the 47:17 mark. Near the end of the show.)
So for Joel, portability is so important that you'll want to stay with a language like VBScript and just consider all other platforms a compile target. It's in light of those words of wisdom that I don't think Wasabi is a joke. By god, I wish it were, but I don't think so.
Joel?
P.S.: Quick comments on the original two complaints that actually had any merit. First unicode, yes, it's currently more cumbersome than would be nice to deal with it. But it's by no means insurmountable. All applications at 37signals happily speak UTF-8. We got people from 50+ countries using Basecamp with content in their native language. Lots of applications run internationalized too. We got a great Rails constituency in Japan, Russia, and elsewhere who manage to make it work. But sure, it should and will be nicer to deal with shortly.
Second speed, Rails is for the vast majority of web applications Fast Enough. We got sites doing millions of dynamic page views per day. If you end up being with the Yahoo or Amazon front page, it's unlikely that an off-the-shelve framework in ANY language will do you much good. You'll probably have to roll your own. But sure, I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter.
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