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by aysar 5301 days ago
If you have companies like Facebook using it... surely you'd think PHP is on the right path, no?
2 comments
mindstab 5301 days ago
That's not really saying anything. Facebook picked PHP in 2004 and is now stuck with it. They have a huge code base in it.

But there are a lot of indications they are moving away from it in all places they can. They still use it for front end work, but even there they have been one of the biggest innovators coming out with the HipHop PHP compiler.

Behind that they also came up with the Thrift RPC framework specifically so that the rest of their code and logic could be written in many other languages including Java, Python and Erlang.

Facebook is a lot more than PHP and they've pushed PHP innovation a lot too. I find their use of PHP as no clear indication PHP is the right or wrong choice. It's just the choice they made 7 years ago and are living with

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simonw 5301 days ago
http://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-Facebook-migrated-away-from-... has some insider insight.
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alexatkeplar 5301 days ago
Facebook have also built a Haskell tool to generate/update their PHP now as well, https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass
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randomdata 5301 days ago
I'm not sure that is a good example. I have no insider knowledge of Facebook so I may not be correct, but as I understand it, they switched to using their own interpreter and translate the code to C++ for production. The only remaining ties being the syntax and at least some of the API.

If the author of this article had the dependencies and resources of Facebook, building their own Flex-based environment independent of Adobe is an option they may have considered as well.

In this case, it was more cost effective to just rewrite the application in another language. Facebook found it cheaper to rewrite the environment. But the end result of breaking ties with a third party appears to be the same.

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