Facebook unveils Hack, a faster programming language to power the social network

[w0rp]

On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 05:53:41 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> It doesn't matter how beautiful a language is, as soon as you 
> put them on the hands of an average developer, the result will 
> be horrible.
>
> But if the said developers deliver, that is everything the 
> customer cares about. Regardless of what gets discussed about 
> quality in software
> conferences.
>
> --
> Paulu

That's what is interesting about Facebook and PHP. PHP is a 
terrible language, we all know this. However the Facebook 
developers are obviously very good at what they do. So in the 
hands of them, they can do good things with PHP.

At the time Facebook started, I would argue that no other 
language could deliver the lifecycle PHP does, with all state 
needed for a request living and dying with each request, leaving 
it as just about the only thing which wouldn't slowly get worse 
over time. We are now at a stage where this is not the case, and 
other languages have web development toolkits stable enough to 
not cause gradual corruption. Still, I can recount a tale where 
upgrading to Django 1.5.0 at my office caused a memory leak, 
because of a bug in Django which was fixed in the next patch. 
This kind of problem was very common years ago.