The Joel on Software Discussion Group

"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic with closures and lambdas".

I mean, he's gone on about only using widely used language universes for a whole article and then he talks about this private Wasabi language.  Then, to make the joke more obvious he says it is a "functional-programming dialect of Basic".  He has said in the past it is written in VBScript that can be compiled to PHP using "Thistle" and rewrites is another thing he has ranted about in the past.

So, just pointing out I'm the first person to get the joke here.

Okay, missed the "Wasabi" topic - maybe I wasn't first after all.

LOL!James, trust me, you aren't.

But let's be serious here. Joel must be in the hospital by now. I fail to see how anyone couldn't when one laughs so hard and so much.

I assumed it was a joke when I read the article.

I didn't laugh, because it wasn't funny, but I got the joke.

But since I've read the discussion board, with so many people taking it seriously,  a small seed of doubt (whether it's a joke) got planted in my mind.

it might well be a joke. But doesn't it contain some good points?

But that joke isn't funny anymore
It's too close to home
And it's too near the bone
It's too close to home
And it's too near the bone
More than you'll ever know ...


(Seriously, I liked it.  Nice writeup, Joel.)

I think it is a subtle joke because it goes against the rest of the article without explanation, yet at the same time isn’t entirely implausible. It is something for people to talk about.

http://www.newtonsoft.com/blog/archive/2006/09/02/How-to-increase-traffic-to-your-blog-_2D00_-the-Spolsky-way.aspx

(different James to the original poster by the way)

Being the romantic I am, I actually think that the rest of the article is the subtle joke, and Wasabi is, if anything, only a slight exaggeration. The entire first part of the article sounds like the typical whining that typical managers do when talking about using anything atypical.

Highlighting Perl as invalid, even though it's been legitimate and widely used for 10 or 15 years now, seems like a dead giveaway for this.

This is hilarios, because it's not a joke.

If you've been reading JoS since the start (as you clearly have James), it is perfectly logical. There are multiple articles in the archive where he mounts convincing defenses of VisualBasic.

As an ASP app, FogBuGZ was originally written in VB (it is one of the languages supported best by ASP). Yes, VBScript to be precise, as in Visual *BASIC* script.

Thus, Wasabi, as a subset of Basic, allowed use of existing FogBUGz code, maybe some trims to get it within the functional subset allowed. Thus, no rewrite.

As you mentioned, Joel originally needed to do cross-compiling of FogBUGZ codebase to PHP,  so they could sell to Linux shops. Why wouln't Thistle, written by a summer intern (as Joel blogged about), mature into Wasabi?

Active records he has mentioned in the past, he wrote about "load" and "save" functions on an ORM. I forget the context.

"Thus, Wasabi, as a subset of Basic, "

Can't really be a subset if it has functional language features. :)

I think the part that is most difficult to believe is the implementation of functional features in the language. Adding Javascript output is easily imagine since Javascript easily has a superset of VBScript features. It's harder to imagine compiling functional features into VBScript, because it would mean *something* like compiling each separate one into a specially named class that interns captured variables, etc. Of course, it was done for anonymous delegates in C#, but I don't see the FogBugz team having a strong enough reason to do it...

I know nothing of VB, but wouldn't the word "dialect" imply features not available in VB? I used the term "subset" of VB but maybe I was wrong on that -- something that goes a bit beyond VB but is VB like?

It's way to close to things known to be true to be a joke. Thistle is known to exist but to have only been written in one summer (thus justifying new work and a new code name), JavaScript is known to be needed because FB was recently AJAXified.

And I actally I think Ben, the intern who wrote Thistle, was indeed hired onto staff, so he is probably the "one of our best developers."

wasabi = make of car in novel 'good omens'

a book that meantions in passing the day the japanese moved from fiendish automitons to cunning designers.. aparently this car was designed ont hat very day, leading to the worst of both worlds.

oh yes and its a car you spend more time pushing than driving.

i think tis funny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasabi