When I learn a new, perhaps hyped-up computer language, I soon run into difficulties, no matter what the merits of the language. The difficulties are lack of tooling. eg, no debugger - or only a rudimentary one, no static analysis, no refactoring, no advanced code browser.
If the language is successful, these things come with time.
When you develop an in-house language, you'll never get the advanced tooling that makes for a great software development experience. This, for me, was why I was surprised by Joel Spolsky's announcement of an in-house language.
(Although, to be fair, these things didn't really exist of VBScript nor for PHP at the time Wasabi came to be.)
I think your bracketed comment says it all; there was no obvious alternative at that time which would satisfy the market conditions. The VBScript version was super easy to install for most companies with the servers they already had available. They had a selling feature which was entirely dependent on this terrible technology. So they mitigated it. It's all pretty reasonable.
When I learn a new, perhaps hyped-up computer language, I soon run into difficulties, no matter what the merits of the language. The difficulties are lack of tooling. eg, no debugger - or only a rudimentary one, no static analysis, no refactoring, no advanced code browser.
If the language is successful, these things come with time.
When you develop an in-house language, you'll never get the advanced tooling that makes for a great software development experience. This, for me, was why I was surprised by Joel Spolsky's announcement of an in-house language.
(Although, to be fair, these things didn't really exist of VBScript nor for PHP at the time Wasabi came to be.)