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> Facebook is written in PHP For social reasons, not technical ones. PHP is the language of cheap labour. To address the technical issues, Facebook's PHP code

• cfreeman 10y ago
  And social reasons aren't important? It's classic socially clueless developer mentality to think technical considerations are the only thing that matter.
  • yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Assuming you believe social reasons are important (rather than an unfortunate constraint on the world), then my strategy is still valid (if it works). It will make the technically superior languages socially superior as well.
  • yvdriess 10y ago
    > classic clueless developer mentality Nice straw man argument. Pointing out that PHP is used for social/economic reasons is exactly saying that there are considerations outside technical merit. At the same time, Facebook is a big Haskell user, but that is because of its technical merits. (Simon Marlow works for Facebook) On a back-end technology such as a compiler, the technical merits of the language are much more important than the social merits of finding enough low-skilled/low-paid developers.
• shanacarp 10y ago
  No, mostly timing ones. Php was the cutting edge yet fully developed technology when they launched at Harvard. Developing CakePHP was in part a technical decision driven by the reality that a full rewrite in a new language is a form of technical debt in and of itself because of the time involved. Or so I've heard