--edit it's free for students too
2 I'm of the opinion that truly top talent doesn't care about the language. It's the programming problems they care about. Fogbugz does some non trivial stuff like evidence based scheduling. I'm sure some top programmers would find that interesting, regardless of whether it's programmed in a vb-like syntax or not.
Having said that, Joel says a lot of things, some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. It's the Internet. Opinions are plentiful, and we're all free to agree or disagree.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html: "FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html: "And since FogBugz goes back many years and was originally written in VBScript, Wasabi is 100% backwards-compatible with VBScript." (granted, VB != VBScript)
http://fogcreek.com/Jobs/Dev.html: "Today we happen to use Wasabi, JavaScript, xhtml and CSS, and C++ to build FogBugz"
Nevertheless, Wasabi is to VB as Arc is to Lisp.
It isn't written in VB and never was. In 2000 it was written in classic ASP (vbscript) and c++. Probably a few years after that it was converted to Wasabi, which at the time was very close to VBScript, but is now equivalent to C#. For the last few years it is shipped as a .NET product on both windows and unix, and the /Dev.html page you cited is accurate. (The articles you cited from four years ago aren't accurate anymore).