PHP is a joke.
Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
171–180 of 422 posts
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which mainstream language would you have chosen in 2003 that you think would have had similar success?
Any. Really, any. Facebook is throwing a lot of engineering effort into fixing things that now matter to them, but didn't when they started (and were small). They could have picked Perl CGI's and it'd still have happened (perhaps Perl 6 would be a success these days). I don't think PHP has played any role in bringing FB to the size it is today (programming language does not translate to number of users signing up). S…
I believe Python might have worked. It's grown well as a web development language since then by itself. It may have forced several rewrites before WSGI came about. It is a relatively easy language to learn, to hire for, and has few massive warts. (Ruby is roughly in this category too, in my opinion.)
I believe Perl probably would not have worked. It hasn't grown much as a web development language since then (although it has some great web frameworks). The language itself has languished in both development and community growth, and it fairly esoteric and certainly harder to learn than Python and PHP, and would have been harder to hire for. It seems unlikely that pre-2010 Facebook to meaningfully have changed the trajectory of the language (ie, Perl 6 being a success).
I don't think Java, C++ (or C), Cold Fusion, ASP, Haskell, Ocaml, and many other languages would have worked, for a bunch of reasons. Harder to hire for, harder to iterate with, more costly in terms of infrastructure, harder to teach/learn, and so forth.
PHP isn't a totally insignificant part of Facebook being as successful as it has been. A good-enough language choice was necessary, at least, and PHP it seems was a good-enough choice.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no. Yes, because TypeScript is bringing a type-system to a dynamically typed language and so did Hack. No: because Hack is bringing some additional language features affecting the runtime. Modest changes for now, but we intend to carry on in that direction.
Well, it seems Microsoft is doing similarly with Typescript, except instead, waiting for the spec to catch up. I like both ideas.
I don't know what you mean by that... stuff like classes were already in the harmony proposal phase before Typescript implemented them. Stuff like type hints won't be in JS ever.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#174This is great and exactly what I need in my PHP. Glad to see types making sort of a come back (see also: TypeScript) as I think they're, in one way or another, necessity in a large scale applications.
One note though - the success of this depends on the success of HHVM. Hopefully FB guys understand that and will push even more to make HHVM the best platform to have for running PHP on.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation. Because perfect is not the enemy of the good? Because "build atop a crumbling foundation" has demonstrated time and again to be, by far, the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing? Unless you have some example of perfect, now dominant, technologies that have been created ex nihilo that I'm missing? I mean we (facebook) are…
Because "build atop a crumbling foundation" has demonstrated time and again to be, by far, the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing? I can't imagine where that sort of conclusion comes from. Building on a crumbling foundation seems to be just about the most proven, reliable way to ensure your software project won't survive more than a short time without needing serious effort just to maintain it an…
> Much of the world still runs on C
But these days, most interesting applications run on C++, which started from the arguably crumbling foundation (from C++'s point of view, not per se) of C, and grew organically over several major revisions into something hideously complex.
This trait of C++ is not a good thing, but the amount of successful software written in it seems to prove that it's not fatal either.
> You can still run applications from nearly 20 years ago on Windows today, in no small part because of Microsoft's persistent focus on compatibility and keeping the basics reliable over that time.
Layers of hacks on hacks to keep old software running correctly is exactly "building on a crumbling foundation", and probably the reason Microsoft is trying to get rid of Win32, having severely limited its availability on ARM in favor of the WinRT APIs. But I'd say the venerable success of Win32 demonstrates that the crumbling foundation works.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#176I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation. I have wondered why FB didn't use a proper language with proper typing to begin with. I mean, I "understand" logistically: they already had a giant codebase in PHP, migrating a codebase is expensive, and it's difficult to hire and train 1000s of hackers in e.g., OCaml. (They do have some OCaml people, but they are outliers. OCaml was my favor…
The HN crowd seems to dislike (or despise perhaps?) PHP, but it's really not that bad. Yes it has a lot of warts, but it has a lot of things that make it nice for web development. a) try your new code by saving in your editor, and hitting reload in your web browser. b) it's very approachable. People who only know HTML and CSS can be expected to do a little bit of PHP work to integrate their changes. If you setup the…
Yes, PHP is its own web framework, but it's not a very good one. And, as you say, implementing a better one on top of it adds a lot of overhead due to the execution model. With other languages, where you don't throw everything away at the end of the request, you are free to implement a good web framework without suffering additional overhead.
As for a), many (most?) frameworks are able to monitor the source files and reload the application when they change, in order to enable that workflow. For example: http://cherrypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/refman/process/plu...
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#177Somewhat unrelated, but curious : Does anyone know if Facebook still uses MySQL heavily?
Yes, we are still very active users of MySQL. Most of the primary portions of facebook.com are still served from a backend MySQL system (with lots of caching and many other services involved). Some data is not stored in MySQL, but in other systems such as HBase (messages being a big one).
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation. Because perfect is not the enemy of the good? Because "build atop a crumbling foundation" has demonstrated time and again to be, by far, the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing? Unless you have some example of perfect, now dominant, technologies that have been created ex nihilo that I'm missing? I mean we (facebook) are…
> Just so we are clear, you ask why Facebook didn't rewrite 10,000 human-years of code into a mythical unnamed "proper" ... You don't need to rewrite anything (at least, not all at once.) Personally, I'd have expected you to make something akin to CoffeeScript or ClojureScript that targets PHP, and can "link with" your existing PHP modules (or rather, with their HHVM bytecode representations.) Then treat the PHP code…
That is essentially what Hack is.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#179I wish these extensions came by way of the PHP core rather than a language that is superimposed on PHP. However, this is awesome. Is this a layer that is superimposed on PHP that falls back to the default interpreter for unimplemented features or is this a fresh implementation. I suppose my question is, how reliable is this. Are the core PHP bugs going to manifest here? If a bug gets fixed on core PHP, will hack be l…
> I wish these extensions came by way of the PHP core Well where is PHP core then? to my knowledge while PHP 5 was a huge step forward, PHP core did little to fix PHP stupid design flaws,for the sake of backward compatibility. We are in a new era, libraries are more and more decoupled,so they are easy to write or rewrite,backward compatibily shouldnt be an issue when libraries are well versioned and tested across dif…
Can you expand on "Wordpress folks dont care about PHP.next" ?
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
PHP is a "crumbling foundation" in exactly the same way DOS, Windows, COBOL, and C and C++ were, are, "crumbling foundations". I don't see how you are disagreeing with me. You are proving the point. You aren't actually going to claim that Windows was well-conceived and theoretically well-founded, are you? Windows has been a never ending refinement on exceptionally shaky ground.
It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation -- a point that reasonable people could debate -- rather than that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful ways to accomplish anything in computing, which was the claim I challenged. Incidentally, my point about languages like C or operating systems like Windows was not that they are theoretically wonderful under the hood…
I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running.
Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply to C and C++ and Win32 and Google and basically every other large software system as well. That's the point the grandparent is making - if you look at pretty much any successful, evolving software system under the hood, you'll see a byzantine mess of complexity, and it's a wonder that it ever works.