The part about Spolsky, if true, is interesting because Joel obviously doesn't see some of the decisions he made at Microsoft as wrong since he's still doing the same thing.
"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "
Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?
I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
You know, "meh". This is basically like saying, "when he was at Microsoft, Spolsky traded off the vision of a grand unified scripting architecture for all Microsoft products in favor of something that the Excel team could actually execute on and launch. Later on, when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting for the industry to come up with a totally acceptable cross-platform development environment". He sounds consistently pragmatic, if perhaps a bit inelegant.
"when he founded Fog Creek, he allowed a developer to write a custom scripting language to implement common-codebase cross-platform, rather than waiting using one of the many totally acceptable cross-platform development environment readily available"
"He made other similarly stupid decisions like creating a custom programming interface for BASIC in Excel instead of sharing a common interface as strongly recommended. "
Did anyone else think of his special Fog Creek internal programming language?
I particularly like this article that says you should only write new production code in a language lots of people know and others have lots of experience in and then ends with we don't though. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html