2. He is describing a stupid decision he made, which is framed around an unacknowledged stupid decision he made years ago (see 3).
3. His company uses a private language they wrote themselves, for totally ridiculous reasons, despite having written essays about how "you shouldn't let your programmers use any non-mainstream languages".
When I first read about Wasabi, I kind of wondered. But then in a previous lifetime, I was with a company that wrote its own compiler. A few years after that, the CEO said "thank god for that compiler" as it relieved pressure on a target chip decision. Similarly, Wasabi has targeted a completely different end architecture with apparently little fuss. This is not a trivial result.
I think people are upset that Joel markets it as a good idea when, in fact, it is probably not that good of an idea.
(Yes, he gets that 1% of the market that can't run whatever language they pick, but he has to maintain his own in-house programing language and toolchain, and train new developers to use a language that exists nowhere else in the world.)
I mean, seriously, what's with all the random ire in the HN comments on this story?