Clearly they hate their tooling enough that there is a proliferation of build tools, frameworks and other utilities to make work more palatable, and if you haven't at least dabbled in designing your own language, you missed some sort of crucial step in your development as a programmer. If anything, not everyone has the time and energy (and hubris) to actually follow through with it on a major project. I don't think Jon advised anyone to do what he did, it's a massive gamble. If you're that type of person - contrarian and self-directed to a fault - you can't help but do what he did, you don't need or will accept anyone else's advice.