A language that supported a platform for almost twenty years in the modern era? I can't call this anything but a wild success. Sure, it had issues, as discussed on the article, but they solved the business problem at the moment in time. No software decision is without costs, but running a major site for almost two decades indicates that they chose well.<p>Bravo!<p>I do wish they'd throw the source code up on GitHub, as it would be an interesting historical artifact.
This is the sort of programming language that I would love to read a detailed retrospective of in an ACM journal. It's a programming language designed to solve a particular problem, grew over time for that problem, and it successfully did so for almost 20 years. A programming language that is useful that long is interesting to me.
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.<p>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.
> Recruiting new engineers was sometimes a challenge because candidates had to accept that they were joining an organization with a homegrown programming language and build system.<p>I got an offer from NYT in 2009, but rejected it because of the custom language thing. My interview was conducted entirely using this custom language, and the interviewers were uninterested in discussing any other technology. Even architectural questions, which I attempted to answer in terms of industry standards, were steered towards Context.
I'd love to see an example of the language, I kept reading (the story is great) but it felt like we got left hanging without any code snippets to put it all in, uh, context I guess.
Man - I have to fight tooth n nail to make code just a little more performant / re-usable / robust to changing requirements.<p>How on Earth did they get permission to invent a whole new language for a user name feature?<p>Jealous...
I think it was this site where I remember Context from: <a href="https://www.mangaupdates.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mangaupdates.com/</a>
Back then in my school years I remember not being able to find anything about this language. Mystery solved now. Thank you.
> “We probably over-engineered it, I guess,” Damens said.<p>Exactly. Also, creating a programming language for something as simple as a newspaper is pretty much a nightmare. Worrying about scalability when most of their content is static.