Note that Joel's company Fog Creek software actually did develop their flagship product, FogBugz, on their own compiler: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

Note that the product came first, then the compiler.

There is always the question of degree and practicality. So in terms of libc / and custom compilers that is perhaps ad absurdum. There really wouldn't be any practical benefit taking it to that far for most companies. However, people that love programming languages often probably wish it was practical and that they had an excuse to write compilers at some point.

As far as Dell goes, I honestly have mixed feelings at this point. When I started at the company there was less than 10 people, so the idea of having centralized firmware updates etc seemed practical. I'm not sure I really feel this way any more -- I go back forth. But sticking with Dell seems to make sense at this point so we have more uniformity in hardware and management.

A friend of mine has the uncanny ability of re-formulating every problem he is given in such a way that the logical solution to the problem is always: "Lets write a parser". He loves writing them. Not quite 'writing your own compiler' but it's going that way.

The practicality argument doesn't apply when they already say they're doing more than necessary because they love computers and if you don't that you don't really love computers.

When someone says that you don't love computers because you did whats most practical or cost effective for you, how can they say that they love computers when they do or don't do something else because its most practical or cost effective to them?

If it saves my time, is cheaper or easier to use amazon rather than running my own data center, that doesn't mean I don't love computers. If they love computers so much that practicality is out the window, then why aren't they using their own operating systems and libc's?

Clearly there's no difference in effort between a day installing and configuring a Dell server and several thousand person years of writing a solid, scalable operating system, so your question is perfectly reasonable.

I understand that what I'm saying is a bit of a stretch, but when they claim people don't love computers for not doing that they're doing, they may as well take it to the extreme. People have written operating systems, maybe these people should say everybody else doesn't love computers.

I mean, obviously I don't expect anyone to build everything they use. My argument was aimed at the "you don't love computers" statement and not at the fact that they don't write their own OS.

> So in terms of libc / and custom compilers that is perhaps ad absurdum.

Not totally silly, Apple has been doing sort of the same thing with clang/llvm.

You don't really love computers unless you're working out every bit of the quantum mechanics necessary to design and model its integrated circuits on a chalkboard.

... and even then you wouldn't really love computers unless you were quarrying your own calcite and slate.

Whom is going to do a better job? A group of educated, passionate people that can troubleshoot their own problems in realtime? Or "Peggy" at Cloud Vendor X that deals with 400 other clients?

That depends on whether the fix that Peggy deploys for one client also fixes the same problem for the other 399.

In other words: It depends.

There's no general answer, because deciding where to draw the abstraction barrier between you and your vendors is an unsolved, difficult, and evolving problem.