[shafte]

I'm not second-guessing the technical that the Times made here (I'm sure it made sense given their constraints), but I do wonder if these kinds of in-house general-purpose languages will die out eventually. Some of the comments indicating that this sort of project is a "red flag" seem to miss that 20 years ago the language landscape was a lot more proprietary/closed.

But these days, a big open source/community ecosystem is a really really strong reasons to invest in an existing language (or at least open-source your in-house language, a la Hack or Go). It's hard for in-house general-purpose languages to compete.