4 ms·

It's a shame that Hack didn't replace PHP in general use. I didn't see a mention in the article, but it was created to be exactly this safer/faster/more elegant

It's a shame that Hack didn't replace PHP in general use. I didn't see a mention in the article, but it was created to be exactly this safer/faster/more elegant version of PHP. For example, it has a broad type system including generics. My first decent sized codebase was web site for my high school in vanilla PHP. It was a total mess (mostly due to my lack of experience and the need to support Netscape 4.7). I understand that some PHP apps are good, though I got burned by WordPress vulnerabilities enough to swear it off. I wrote a little code in Hack while at fb, and the incremental typing was slowly evolving a messy codebase to some kind of order. (https://hacklang.org https://hacklang.org)

timw4mail 7y ago
Wordpress is not PHP. Wordpress would be just as bad in Hack.
- Implicated 7y ago
  Seconding this. As someone who built (5 years ago now) and maintains a client application that runs along side a Wordpress/WooCommerce shop of pretty high volume - it's absolutely mind blowing to me the kinds of decisions that Automattic/Wordpress/WooCommerce make... from a code and operation viewpoint.
xixixao 7y ago
I agree, it's a shame we don't push Hack more broadly (in general I think the reason is our teams are focused on internal adoption and improvements, and don't feel they would benefit from supporting open source community), it's such a pragmatic language, so familiar that folks pick it up super quickly, it's getting an awesome standard library now, it's a got a great type system, great IDE integration, scales to our bizillion lines of code...
- wink 7y ago
  I think part of it was because it was being pushed at all. I didn't see a lot of collaboration from Hack towards PHP. It was a - sadly typical - "Hey, here's our thing, it's better". A few select individuals came forward (or were part of PHP core already) but it felt like a Silo, so I'm not surprised there wasn't a lot of participation from outside. PHP 7 and the speed improvements were a direct answer to HHVM, though.

timw4mail 7y ago

Wordpress is not PHP. Wordpress would be just as bad in Hack.

Implicated 7y ago
Seconding this. As someone who built (5 years ago now) and maintains a client application that runs along side a Wordpress/WooCommerce shop of pretty high volume - it's absolutely mind blowing to me the kinds of decisions that Automattic/Wordpress/WooCommerce make... from a code and operation viewpoint.

xixixao 7y ago

I agree, it's a shame we don't push Hack more broadly (in general I think the reason is our teams are focused on internal adoption and improvements, and don't feel they would benefit from supporting open source community), it's such a pragmatic language, so familiar that folks pick it up super quickly, it's getting an awesome standard library now, it's a got a great type system, great IDE integration, scales to our bizillion lines of code...

wink 7y ago
I think part of it was because it was being pushed at all. I didn't see a lot of collaboration from Hack towards PHP. It was a - sadly typical - "Hey, here's our thing, it's better". A few select individuals came forward (or were part of PHP core already) but it felt like a Silo, so I'm not surprised there wasn't a lot of participation from outside. PHP 7 and the speed improvements were a direct answer to HHVM, though.