Facebook is the world's largest PHP shop. Does that mean that everyone should use PHP? As it turns out, moving fast and breaking things isn't all that conduciv

Facebook is the world's largest PHP shop. Does that mean that everyone should use PHP? As it turns out, moving fast and breaking things isn't all that conducive to quality engineering[1][2]. Facebook has a massive legacy code base maintained by an enormous team that is under pressure to iterate quickly while supporting what is arguably the world's largest user base. They are dealing with extremely specialized constraints that most of us will never encounter. Many of the trade-offs they consider acceptable aren't trade-offs that make sense elsewhere. And that's exactly what the blog post is getting at. A lot of these emerging technologies are situationally useful in a particular set of scenarios and environments, but developers with cargo cult mentality convince themselves that these things will solve all of their problems if they use them everywhere. When the disappointment sets in and they figure out that isn't the case, yesterday's darling stack becomes the subject of today's "considered harmful" essays and everybody moves on to the next shiny thing. The point here is that maybe you should make a sober assessment of new technologies and objectively evaluate whether they are actually practical for your usage scenario rather than just blindly jumping on the bandwagon and using something. The examples from the blog post are totally on point. I previously worked at a company that built a NoSQL database and I have great affinity for the technology, but there's no question that too many people adopted NoSQL databases without really understanding the trade offs. People want to be "web scale" so they go straight to using databases that are designed for high-availability clustering even when they are building applications that would be perfectly fine running forever on a single postgres instance. [1] https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-problem/ https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p... [2] http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707 http://blog.timac.org/?p=1707