381–390 of 422 posts
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Facebook is literally 60% water, whence they came. Pretty wild when you think about it.
That 60% figure pertains to average humans. Those skinny hipsters are mostly calcium :)
Ok, I cede the point. PHP has the retro chic and Hack's type system is fixed-gear.
I 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. 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…
That's only because the currency for building things on top of crumbing foundations has been sweat and man-power. We aren't that far off from the Egyptians that were using hundreds of thousands of slaves per pyramid. It's a good thing that we've transcended the necessity for hundreds of thousands of slaves when raising buildings, don't you think?
And yet, here you are, claiming that building stuff with broken tools is the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing. Actually I view it as nothing short of a miracle, showing human determination in action ;-)
> All languages, runtimes, and standard libraries (and databases, and source control, and on and on) are "broken" at sufficient scale.
That's a fallacy. Just because both X and Y are broken, that doesn't mean they are equal, as some things are more broken than others and PHP is more broken than anything else mainstream (C++ at least has reasons). Also, I don't see how "at scale" changes things in PHP's favor, I really don't.
If you're trying to argue that "at scale" the level of brokenness converges to the same levels, then that's a stupid thing to say. After all, Twitter didn't had to build its own JVM and the stuff they run on top of the JVM is probably more power efficient than you'll ever be with HHVM. Probably saner too.
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Neither of those would even remotely qualify is accomplishments in computing. But they also are terrible examples. Facebook isn't using PHP anymore, that's what this discussion is all about. Wikimedia is terrible, and wikipedia is almost exclusively static content being served by squid.
What are we discussing? Are we discussing about the tool or the things made from tools? Its like trolling a raw cast iron hammer used to build a furniture factory and then saying the whole factory is entirely useless just because some invented a stainless steel hammer.
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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.
I'm appalled and little bit insulted that you group PHP in the same group with COBOL, C and C++ in terms of their foundation. COBOL and C were designed by some of the greatest pioneers of the field, and indeed PHP is built on C.
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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…
That depends. It could also be argued that our current tools are limiting what we can accomplish and at some point we'll need a revolution, otherwise we'll hit a ceiling, just like when concrete replaced the need to carve and place rocks on top of each other.
For example living organisms are way more adaptable, more self-healing than anything we've ever built. Our own body should be a text-book example of massive parallelism involving trillions of independent agents that cooperate with each other. In particular, the process of wound healing that happens when you cut yourself is quite fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_healing
If we wanted to simulate the human body, or at least the human brain, since that's the most interesting part, somehow I'm not seeing C++ in that picture.
I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.
Generics, lambdas, type annotations. This looks awesome, seems like the next generation for PHP programming. Can I embed it? Or extend it via compiled binaries written in C/C++?
As the author of pretty much THE book on writing PHP Extensions ( http://amazon.com/dp/067232704X ), I can say with a fair bit of authority that writing HHVM extensions is SO SO SO much easier.
I'm the manager of the team that developed Hack, and I'm sitting here with some of the language designers. Happy to answer your questions.
Thank you for your work on this and for open sourcing it. It looks like it can make large code bases in PHP a great deal more manageable. Do you expect Hack to be stable without large breaking changes going forward? The documentation doesn't say much about the scheduling for asynchronous tasks. Can async functions be used to batch requests to e.g. caches and databases? Can Awaitable be used to interface with code tha…
Our internal plumbing is different, so the extension APIs aren't the same, thus PHP extensions can't normally be used with HHVM. Paul has a source-compatability transformer which works for simple extensions (no fancy stuff allowed), but we recommend anyone with an extension consider porting the code.
If your extension is one of those "This was written in PHP but we wanted it to be faster so we turned it into C" types, you should consider going back to PHP for it. In practice, we find that HHVM can JIT PHP code into running about as fast as (sometimes faster than) C/C++ extension code.
If you do need to dip into C/C++ (because you're calling an external library), the API we've designed is a LOT easier to work with than PHP's. And I say that with the authority of having written THE book on writing PHP extensions: http://amazon.com/dp/067232704X .
I'm working on proper documentation for extensions as we speak, but for now you can find some very basic info at https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/wiki/Extension-API .
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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…
I'm running multithreaded background processes in PHP pretty successfully. I did not see (and still do not see) a reason why I should have chosen another "proper" language for it. P.S. The vast majority of arguments against PHP here leads me to conclusion that most of (not all) debaters don't understand how PHP works well enough.
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> 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? That's only because the currency for building things on top of crumbing foundations has been sweat and man-power . We aren't that far off from the Egyptians that were using hundreds of thousands of slaves per pyramid. It's a good thing that we've transcended the nec…
False, they were skilled, paid laborers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_t...
Apologies for being irrelevant to the main point, but this is a tired myth.