[toyg]

> Remember the age of Fogbugz. It was initially released in 2000.

God, don't I half remember it. I was a junior ASP dev at the time, for my sins. Java was hot like the sun and PHP was the default choice for the young and penniless. Perl was mainstream. Python and Ruby were new and rough (they were crap for webdev on shared hosts, with zero support by ISPs, but alpha geeks were already flocking to their ecosystems, Python in particular).

I'm sure part of the reasoning was that FogBugz did not start as a product -- the product back then was CityDesk, which was even more tied in the MS world -- but still, the "server scene" back then was already unix-y, which is why they were pretty soon forced to consider Linux support. I still think it was a shortsighted approach but hey, FogCreek is still alive 15 years later, so I guess it wasn't all that bad.

[aviv]

One of my first jobs ages ago was to convert a large Perl codebase to ASP 2.0 because my new boss, a 22 year old CTO, was replacing a guy more than twice his age and Perl was "for old folks" as he put it. This one person turned the whole company into a Microsoft dev shop with one decision simply because he didn't feel comfortable around Perl code.

[marktangotango]

COO at a previous company did this, went from Java to .Net shop. This was two years ago. Laid off most of the Java developers, brought in consultants. I had left, but there were some really intricate business processes in that code base, running on a 40 node jboss cluster. They embarked on a rewrite, which of course is taking longer than promised. All the Java developers who could, got jobs and left, now there are only two guys left who know how to deploy to the the cluster. And they use scripts, they don't understand anything they're doing. The competent people left long ago.