ambition

Inspired by http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161522, I think lots of people would love to hear more about startups' early stories. How did you decide what to work on? How confident were you in the opportunity? What else was interesting about your very early days?

I'm looking for some (serious) anecdotes describing debugging experiences of domain-specific language programs. In particular, I want to know about particularly thorny bugs which caused you lots of headaches. I'd like to know how you cracked the problem-- what techniques/tools you used: did you 'home in' on the bug systematically, did you use a special-purpose debugger, etc. A very brief stream-of-consciousness reply (right now!) would be better than a carefully-worked-out story. If you want to keep it private, my email is in my profile.

(Motivation: For my Master's research I will study DSL debugging. DSLs get lots of hype---from Paul Graham, Dave Thomas, Charles Simonyi, Sergey Dmitriev, the Ruby crowd and others---but debugging issues are rarely discussed. This trawl is inspired by Marc Eisenstadt's "Tales of Debugging from the Front Lines." In fact I ripped the text above from his paper.)

Thanks!