Looks like another way to polish the PHP turd.
Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
251–260 of 422 posts
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#252Looks like Facebook might have inadvertently turned PHP trendy again. Expect "Why I migrated from Go to Hack" articles soon enough. Either way, the name is very fitting. I have no use for this, but good for Facebook that they've managed to (at least to some extent) evade some of the many PHP pitfalls.
I started web programming using PHP back in 2000, but quickly moved to Python a couple of years later and never looked back. That is, until I joined FB this year as a data engineer. Programming in PHP with Hack/XHP is awesome.
Is Hack an evolution of XHP, or is XHP a subcomponent of Hack?
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was the stupid decision "made back then"? That Zuck wrote the first version of thefacebook.com in PHP, the language he was the most productive at? That the initial team didn't rewrite Facebook in Python/Perl/Ruby/Haskell during the fast growth phase? If you have ever experienced the growth phase, you understand how ludicrous the idea of rewrite would be. I've personally experienced and heard only horror stories…
> What was the stupid decision "made back then"? Using PHP to begin with was a bad technical decision. Failing to establish a reasonable migration strategy was a bad business decision likely rooted in bad engineering management that fell out of starting with bad technical decisions . It's much harder to hire people that can pull you out of a mess like PHP when, at the same time, you have to hire people that can keep…
As much as I prefer not to engage trolls...
Which language would have been a good technical decision in 2002-2003? It needs to be fast enough in terms of iteration. It needs to not require more resources than PHP. It must be easy to onboard people who don't know it onto. It needs to be easy to operate, and not be costly to deploy on the tens, hundreds, and then thousands of servers necessary. (Spending time learning a new technology that others think is cool or which seems cool, while trying to also build a product, has sunk more than a few startups...)
What was bad about the decision to keep the reasonably well-performing and reasonably suited-to-purpose PHP code for front-end code, and peel off suitable tasks into services like the feed, typeahead, messages, and so forth into languages like C++, Java, and so forth. What was bad with the decision to let hundreds of software engineers continue to build the PHP code-base while a much smaller group of people work on projects to improve the efficiency of both the execution environment but also the tooling and developer efficiency on that code-base? Their contribution there is multiplied out by the improved efficiency of those hundreds of developers and the code they wrote.
Seemingly Facebook survived its growth phase fairly well and didn't need a tiger team from outside to handle it - and without the reliability problems others who chose to use languages other than PHP for their front-end and decided to rewrite their much smaller surface area in other languages.
As much as people may dislike PHP (and I'm one of them), it was definitely "good enough". Many languages may not have been, even if they are nicer languages in some objective way.
(Disclaimer: I actually have to write code in Facebook's PHP code-base every once in a while. But most of the code I work with is Python, Java, or C++.)
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is nonsense, because: 1. I have never seen a framework that didn't go to great lengths to update to new changes quickly in development 2. Which means you lose resources between requests, unless you stuff them into the interpreter/httpd itself. And anyway this is only a problem for PHP , where by default everything runs in the top-level namespace, versus in separate functions. 3. That's a funny way to spin "no c…
blink blink um. have you used java?
What, you mean with "hot deployment" of your changes?
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#255"You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification": http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sweet spot that Hack hits is that it combines gradual typing (an idea that hasn't yet seen much real-world adoption) with an incredibly fast typechecker. This lets you choose the pace and extent to which you want to adopt the safety of static typing, while preserving your dynamically typed code -- and without sacrificing the rapid turnaround of PHP. That's a unique combination, in my experience.
How does your approach compare to Typed Racket and Typed Clojure? Could they conceivably achieve the same performance or is there a fundamental difference?
Does Typed Racket have DrRacket support for instant feedback on errors? (It didn't 4+ years ago when I used Racket.)
Typed Racket also includes more types, like ": Integer [more precisely: Negative-Fixnum]" (from docs), as well as polymorphic data structures and higher-order functions. I don't know if this is a "fundamental difference" but it might mean Facebook's type checker can optimize in certain ways that Racket's cannot.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started web programming using PHP back in 2000, but quickly moved to Python a couple of years later and never looked back. That is, until I joined FB this year as a data engineer. Programming in PHP with Hack/XHP is awesome.
Is Hack an evolution of XHP, or is XHP a subcomponent of Hack?
Engineer working on Hack here.
Historically XHP was developed before Hack. It's available as an add-on for PHP but never became a formal part of the PHP language. When Hack was being designed it needed to work well with XHP (as XHP is used a fair amount with Facebook's code base), so over time it made more sense to start thinking of XHP as being one the language features that Hack offers that is not available in stock PHP.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#258I 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…
"I am baffled as to why you'd build your castle atop a crumbling foundation." Congratulations for admitting your ignorance, and lending open ears to experts as to why they made certain engineering decisions. Oh wait, you weren't doing that, you were just warming up to go on a diatribe about how stupid Facebook engineers must be.
I just want to clarify something: I am not calling anyone stupid. Generally the engineers at Facebook are smart, talented, and good at getting things done.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Congratulations for admitting your ignorance, and lending open ears to experts as to why they made certain engineering decisions. Yes, they made certain engineering decisions now because the decisions they made back then were stupid, and they have to dig themselves out.
Yes and the OP is criticizing the decisions being made now as "yak shaving." Could it perhaps be that the "yak shavers" made a conscious and well-reasoned decision to go in the direction of "extend PHP" vs "throw it all out and rewrite everything in language-of-the-month?"
My example, "OCaml", is not a "language of the month." Its roots are >30 years old and wasn't developed by someone in their basement over the weekend. As stated, Facebook even uses OCaml, among other languages, for good reason.
Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM
#260I 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…
Spelling correction: I said "layering FP" but I meant "layering PHP". The edit window has since come and gone.