---
title: "5 Years and $5M Later: Inventing a New Programming Language for Web Development Was a Mistake"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/5-years-and-5m-later-inventing-a-new-programming-language-for-web-development-was-a-mistake-ejjfpi1ui
source_url: https://wasp.sh/blog/2026/05/13/new-language-for-web-dev-was-a-mistake
type: article
source: "Lobsters"
published: 2026-05-14T18:10:40.399Z
updated: 2026-05-14T18:11:04.126Z
tags: ["typescript"]
reading_time: 17
upvotes: 5
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# 5 Years and $5M Later: Inventing a New Programming Language for Web Development Was a Mistake

**[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 17 min read · 5 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

The founders of Wasp, a full-stack web framework for JavaScript, reflect on five years and $5M spent building a custom programming language (DSL) as the configuration layer for their framework. They explain why they originally chose to create a new language (clean syntax, runtime-agnostic vision, and personal excitement about compilers), what went wrong (developer skepticism, IDE tooling burden, positioning confusion with 'wasp-lang'), and why they're now replacing the custom DSL with a TypeScript SDK. The core insight: the value was never the language itself, but Wasp's ability to maintain a high-level understanding of the entire app at compile time. The TypeScript SDK preserves that while eliminating years of friction.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://wasp.sh/blog/2026/05/13/new-language-for-web-dev-was-a-mistake>

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---

Tags: [#typescript](https://daily.dev/tags/typescript)

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