[gecko]

    (Since you're answering arbitrary Fog Creek questions) In retrospect, do you 
    think it was a mistake to make kiln hg-centric at first?

No; I think it was a mistake to not also support Subversion out-of-the-box.

Our customers were overwhelmingly Windows shops, and Git on Windows in 2007 was just unusably bad. It really would not have been a viable option. (I did look at Bazaar and Fossil, which were good players on both Windows and Unix, but neither seemed like a good fit for other reasons.) But Kiln's core value prop at the beginning was actually code review, and I think we could've found a cool way to bring in a Phabricator-like patch workflow that would've meshed just fine with Subversion and given our customers a much easier way to get access to Kiln's goodness. In that world, Mercurial would be a kind of bonus feature you could use, not the only way into Kiln. The resulting product would've been very different, mind, but I think it would've gone way better.

The other three technical mistakes we made, since you didn't ask me, were having FogBugz target .NET instead of Java (given the immaturity of Mono at the time only; I love .NET); having Wasabi compile to C# instead of IL (especially given the previous note); and having Copilot directly modifying VNC and its protocol instead of just jacketing it with a small wrapper app. These three decisions collectively slowed the company down a ton at a time when we shouldn't have let ourselves do that.

I enjoyed working with you, Alex. Glad to see you doing well!

[alexgartrell]

It was a joy to work with you as well :)

It's a bit harsh but I always feel like Fog Creek might be the cautionary tale in "what happens if you over hire for capability vs. your requirements?" I think that a less capable team would have never landed on the "let's maintain our own programming language" approach w.r.t. Wasabi.

As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful technical blog posts for the next ten years :p

[gecko]

    As an aside, I do think that targeting Mono was the right thing to do for
    the universe, as it butterfly-effected tedu into writing weird and wonderful 
    technical blog posts for the next ten years :p

I've never figured out whether that work broke him or was simply his muse, but I also do confess to liking the result. So not a complete loss.

[kamens]

hi alex and ben! in before HN downvotes me

[_ea1k]

I never understood the disdain for Java that I'd hear from Spolsky. It wasn't perfect, but it was certainly more cross platform than .net at the time.

[codinghorror]

I dunno, I'm with Joel on this one. Not a Java fan.

[krallja]

I was at the strategic offsite where we decided to go with .NET. Java wasn’t installed on Windows by default.

The original version of Wasabi, known as Thistle, was written in Java, by the intern in the class before Aardvark’d. It transpiled ASP to PHP.

Every intern class was named after an animal with the next consecutive letter. I don’t remember any of them except Aardvark, and I was a “B????” intern!