This was started 2005, not 2000, it says in the post. .Net had been out for years. They're bleeding edge guys, they would have been looking at .net 2. They used C# as the compiler, with Joel's defence being in 2006:
The greater evil was between rewriting their code in PHP, Java, dealing with Mono or sticking with ASP (which was already old fashioned). Or writing your own language.
From Joel's defence post:
We could use .NET, but then I'd have to pay engineers to install Mono for all our Unix customers, and the .NET runtime isn't quite ubiquitous on Windows servers.
The greater evil was definitely writing their own language.
Obviously, hindsight is wonderful, but they had a lot of people immediately point out it was a bad decision and as they say in their blog post, they ended up having to employ a full time language developer. Installing mono doesn't look so expensive now!
I was running FogBugz on Linux at a particular start-up in either 2001 or 2002, so what you say isn't true. The original project must have been started much earlier than 2005. Edit: See reply below, must be getting old :-(
So Thistle, the transpiler, was written either summer 2003 or summer 2004 (it's not entirely clear if he employed the intern that summer or the next) and Wasabi came later (so 2005 is probably correct).
> I fixed a crazy number of silly bugs in mono’s class libraries. To be fair, implementing all of .NET is a herculean task, and most of the fixes were easy enough to make. The result of these fixes meant that we had to ship a patched, custom version of mono
This was 2007. Using Mono in 2005 does not sound like it would have gone particularly well.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
The greater evil was between rewriting their code in PHP, Java, dealing with Mono or sticking with ASP (which was already old fashioned). Or writing your own language.
From Joel's defence post:
We could use .NET, but then I'd have to pay engineers to install Mono for all our Unix customers, and the .NET runtime isn't quite ubiquitous on Windows servers.
The greater evil was definitely writing their own language.
Obviously, hindsight is wonderful, but they had a lot of people immediately point out it was a bad decision and as they say in their blog post, they ended up having to employ a full time language developer. Installing mono doesn't look so expensive now!