You're missing my point so completely that it becomes a fine example of why engineers make poor businessmen. The best business solution is the one that accompl

You're missing my point so completely that it becomes a fine example of why engineers make poor businessmen. The best business solution is the one that accomplishes the task at hand with the least resources. By that metric, PHP is far superior to Java, regardless of the technical merits at hand. It costs less to hire an army of PHP devs and a small team to optimize PHP, than it does to hire an army of Java developers. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary and http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Java_Developer/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Java_Developer/Salar... The difference in pay is around $20K. If you have 500 developers, that's a difference of $10 mil per year. Over the span of a decade, you're talking about over $100 million in savings. As I said, Facebook is a business, not a pet project or an academic exercise. Decisions on which platform to use and keep are made based on dollars and cents ... not on which is more elegant or technically superior.