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Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

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Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#411

Post by gfodor »

teacup50 wrote: post #328
sanxiyn wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to belittle efforts necessary for the state of the art VM or programming language implementation. I get paid to do these stuffs, and I am on my third VM/PL project now. It is also true these things take time and not very parallelizable, so while man-month may not be that big, you can't make it faster by throwing more people. On the other hand, I maintain it still is no big deal compared to rewriting F…

If they're wasting money on bad management decisions, they're wasting stockholder money. They're also continuing to propagate an outwardly facing engineering culture that will make it even harder to hire people to help dig them out of the PHP hole -- perpetuating this further. Your argument is simply another take on survivor bias fallacy. > I get paid to do these stuffs, and I am on my third VM/PL project now ... Bec…

It's not survivorship bias. Facebook is an existence proof that there is no "PHP hole" that they are in, that it's largely a myth propagated by programming language nerds who have never tried scaling a site in PHP. When was the last time you heard about a site closing up because of PHP-induced technical debt? You don't. People re-write sites because of poor architecture, not because of poor programming languages, and PHP (in general) does not prevent you from building a site with good architecture, both from a software structural standpoint and an operational standpoint.

PHP's APIs are ugly. It's language semantics are a bit hairy until you get the hang of it. But there are parts of PHP that are extremely elegant and easy to reason about. It's OOP support provides all that you need to produce re-usable and easily understood code.

Facebook's work on PHP has focused on largely two dimensions: reducing CPU cycles and increasing static/runtime type checking. The former is something that only really matters at massive scale: PHP is generally fast enough since most of the time PHP processes are I/O bound reading from a database or memcached. It's only for sites like Facebook where if you squeeze out an additional 10% TPS from your boxes that you will start seeing large absolute cost reduction that this level of optimization starts to make sense. On the type checking side, this is something you might start to want in any dynamically typed language when you have millions of lines of code and want to ensure basic guarantees that it will run, and is something that you'd probably see Facebook doing if they were a Ruby or Python shop anyway. It has nothing to do with PHP but with the classic dynamic vs static typing tradeoff.

Should you be writing your chat server in PHP? No. But 90% of the code you write for a large website is HTTP response code rendering HTML or JSON. PHP excels at this and you can pretty much hire any developer off the street to start cranking out code if you give them a solid foundation to build on.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#412

Post by dparoski »

dparoski wrote: post #410
iso8859-1 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Return statements are optional? So it's just the last statement in a function that'll get returned?

The "return" keyword is not needed if the right hand side of the lambda arrow ("==>") is an expression that is not wrapped in curly braces. If the right hand side _is_ wrapped in curly braces then it is treated as a list of statements, in which case you do need to use the "return" keyword.

Edit: My previous comment was referring to the second occurrence of "return" in your example (after the "==>" arrow). Just noticed I mistakenly dropped the first occurrence of "return"; the first occurrence of "return" in your example is needed.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#413

Post by coldtea »

Silhouette wrote: post #191
nostrademons wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term". Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be…

>I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term"

In this case you are mostly hand-waving, and what you say amounts to "I don't like X language".

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#414

Post by coldtea »

dscrd wrote: post #170
lbrandy wrote: post #151

Earlier 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.

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.

C was not build by the "greatest pioneers". Just succesful pioneers.

There were far more evolved and elegant languages at the time C was created (and during the time it took for C to rise, even more were made). LISP for one, but also languages with the same performance characteristics and systems programming capabilities as C.

C definitely wasn't seen as a "great language design" -- just a very useful and pragmatic one (e.g see also the classic "Worse is better" essay).

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#415

Post by dscrd »

adamlett wrote: post #385
dscrd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would you feel insulted? Did you personally create any of those languages? In fact, did you personally create any language? If not, maybe you should't be quite so dismissive of the accomplishment it was to create PHP. Sure, it's not the best language out there, and valid criticisms can be levelled at it, but as they say: It's better to have tried and failed...

I also get a bit (not terribly, just a bit) insulted if somebody says "Beethoven sucks", because the person who said it is technically the same species as I am.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#416

Post by coldtea »

yawboakye wrote: post #399
adamlett wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you feel insulted? Did you personally create any of those languages? In fact, did you personally create any language? If not, maybe you should't be quite so dismissive of the accomplishment it was to create PHP. Sure, it's not the best language out there, and valid criticisms can be levelled at it, but as they say: It's better to have tried and failed...

What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) we should give reasons why we use C and not PHP. If they were equally crappy what would have been the cause of choice of one over the other? I can call PHP th…

>So [only] language designers can be critical of other languages?

Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity.

In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing.

>Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?)

You'd be surprised. PHP is one of the most popular languages and one of the most used languages, so far from "all programmers have a distaste for PHP". So if we were to use that "voting" argument alone (which I find wrong), PHP should be considered a very good language. Not the intention you had, I guess.

While PHP has it warts, it's mainly the less pragmatic and more fad prone programmers that have issues with PHP, those who look for silver bullets and like to feel superior by choice of programming language, editor and the like.

As for programmers "voting with their feet", well, they don't do quite a good job at it. The best languages (like LISP, Smalltalk, OcamL, Haskell, to name but a few etc) are seldom the most popular too.

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#417

Post by codygman »

gfodor wrote: post #225
teacup50 wrote: post #219

Earlier 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?"

I don't like how your comment implies that "throw it all out and rewrite everything in language-of-the-month" is the only option. You could also "throw it all out and rewrite everything in better-AND-mature-language" or even "throw the worst parts out and rewrite incrementally in better-AND-mature-language".

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#418

Post by himelnagrana »

Firstly, Awesome! Need to traverse more in it - definitely.

But as the documentation says primarily "HHVM can run both your PHP and Hack code, either separately or when both are part of one project." -- does that means we can imagine a framework or something like that - where parts of it is in Hacklang and parts are in old PHP?

or such project is somewhere there already?

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#419

Post by henrikbjorn »

bos wrote: post #13
rarestblog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What IDE do people use for Hack?

Stay tuned. You'll hear more in due course. In the mean time, the open source release of Hack includes integration with both Emacs and Vim.

Will the vim plugin be seperated out into a subsplit so it can be used with Vunde or any of the other package managers that exist for VIM?

Re: Hack: a new programming language for HHVM

#420

Post by yawboakye »

coldtea wrote: post #416
yawboakye wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you just said is plain stupid. So our language designers can be critical of other languages? Bullshit! Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is it miraculous that almost all programmers have a distaste for PHP?) we should give reasons why we use C and not PHP. If they were equally crappy what would have been the cause of choice of one over the other? I can call PHP th…

> So [only] language designers can be critical of other languages? Yes. Or rather, other people can be critical too, but language designer' opinions have far more validity. In other words, anybody can say whatever uninformed BS he wants (it's a free country). But that's no replacement for being an expert in what you're discussing. > Since programmers can vote with their feet and gravitate towards better languages (is…

> but language designers' opinions have far more validity

Here's the case we're talking about the work of a language designer. By the way, not all people capable of creating a programming language have created one yet. Marc-André Cournoyer, who wrote the book that Jeremy Ashkenas learnt language design from to write CoffeeScript, has not created a language himself.

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