5 ms·

I have to ask, because it's really been getting at me for a while honestly. How do your developers react to that? I mean, you guys are known for going after the

I have to ask, because it's really been getting at me for a while honestly. How do your developers react to that? I mean, you guys are known for going after the best and the brightest. People who have worked hard to perfect their craft. These people tend to have strong opinions when it comes to language design. How do you get them from that point to "ok, now write some php code" ?

cletus 14y ago
That's easy: the best recognize languages are just a means to an end. Language snobbery, in my experience, tends to be highly correlated with being a "wannabe" rather than "great" and a useful filter. You will find any number of C/C++ programmers who think you can't write anything in Java. Many Java programmers think you can't write anything (beyond 100 lines) in Python. Many Python programmers think you can't (or simply shouldn't) write anything in PHP. And so on. Some people are insecure. Some people can't separate their language from themselves (and see a criticism of their language as a criticism of them as people). Some people exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect [1]. Some, like teenagers, are just asserting their identities. Some simply have biases that are mental blocks. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Not all languages are equal. (if they are, why not just write everything in assembly?)
- dxbydt 14y ago
  That's a well-reasoned but rather lazy response imo. Ppl who have strong opinions when it comes to language design have strong opinions when it comes to language design. Ppl who think languages are just a means to an end think languages are just a means to an end. These are two differenty species and indicative of their particular worldview, attitude and preferences. To use that as any kind of filter is silly. Lets not look at CS for a second...If you want to know what a Stieltjes integral is, a probabilist will tell you one thing, a functional analyst another, and a measure theorist will give you yet another more pedantic definition. There's no right or wrong definition here...every one is coming at it with the tools they are more well versed in. The probabilist is the end-user, so to speak. He can't do his day to day work without internalizing it, because his bread and butter, the PDFs and CDFs of all the distributions he deals with, comes from Stieltjes. The functional analyst is going to use Stieltjes when he deals with Banach spaces, but otherwise he has other preoccupations. The measure theorist studies Stieltjes in depth because it goes to the very foundantion of measure theory...but he isn't really an end-user. Now back to CS...a C++ programmer will think of Java as an interesting toy because you don't get union types and pointers & so forth. The Java guy will think of Python as an interesting toy, and the Python guy thinks PHP is an interesting toy. None of this means any of these people are insecure or being a teenager. If the only goal in life is "languages as means to an end" where end = $$$ in the short term, then yeah, lets just cut to the chase and do PHP. But there are other goals, yeah ?
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  You have obviously never worked on a million-line codebase. When you have crap like this in your language: > E.g., $i = 0; $a[$i] = $i++; makes a different array than $i = 0; $a[$i + 0] = $i++; you have no hope of making a truly large program work. There are just too many sources of itsy bitsy bugs; you'll never find them all. (I'm not a PHP user; I have no idea why those are different arrays. Don't bother explaining; I don't want to know.)
  - harshreality 14y ago
    I don't use PHP much, but I was curious, so here's the answer you don't want: You get $a[1] = 0 the first way, and $a[0] = 0 the second way. PHP seems to evaluate the array index before the right hand side if there is something more than a $variable to evaluate; otherwise PHP evaluates the array index after the right hand side, after $i has been incremented. I haven't used hiphop, but I'm curious if it preserves that disparity between arrays when translating to C++, or if it breaks PHP compatibility by making those two arrays equivalent.
    - kmavm 14y ago
      The entire point of my post was that we preserve the semantics of this (and many other) PHP-isms. We have to, because you never can tell which glitches useful code has come to depend on.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I like how people who exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect are entirely willing to cite it in order to look smart.
rargulati 14y ago
I'm not the best and the brightest, but I'm sure the people they are going after are more excited and concerned with the quality and quantity of problems that facebook is in the unique position to solve. They could probably care less what they use to solve said problems.
xxbondsxx 14y ago
The best and the brightest appreciate the technical, product, and engineering challenges of Facebook and certainly don't waste their time whining about a language or feeling entitled.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Some of us like to write good code in a good language too. Maybe you should be the one to stop being so arrogant as to tell other people what they should feel.
kmavm 14y ago
The aspects of PHP that are bad (and there are more than a few) are easily tooled around. We have a review-time tool that parses your PHP, symbolically executes it, and looks for dubious idioms, flagging them for you and your reviewer. Meanwhile, PHP gets a number of things very right. For instance: * State: there is none across requests. Oh sure, there's APC, and the filesystem, and databases, etc., but those are all accessed via libraries. There is no PHP-level state that survives a request, which provides natural fault isolation: a request which goes wrong doesn't take the server down with it, or live on to corrupt other requests. * Concurrency: PHP's concurrency model is the web request. If you want to run some code in parallel, curl to localhost. If you wrap an appropriate library around this, it looks just like Erlang's actors. This is shared-nothing concurrency, which turns out to be a compelling local maximum. * Interactivity: The development workflow PHP provides is very productive. You save and load the page. You don't save, optionally recompile, restart the server, wait for it to initialize, forget what's different from the last three times you tried this because this has all taken three minutes and you forgot to write it down, etc. These three things turn out to be among the most important parts of a server-side language, and PHP gets them very, very right. The rightness was accidental, not by design, but this doesn't make it any less right. Also, the language itself can be improved. In the HipHop toolchain, -v Eval.EnableHipHopSyntax=true turns on a bunch of (backwards-compatible) features we've added to our PHP dialect, the most notable of which are XHP (syntax for using XML literals as PHP expressions) and generators (inspired by Python's, using similar 'yield' syntax). I put up some sample code for a talk just the other day, if you're curious: https://github.com/kmafb/hiphop-samples https://github.com/kmafb/hiphop-samples
- swah 14y ago
  Is that tooling you mentioned related to/uses 'pfff' ? (https://github.com/facebook/pfff https://github.com/facebook/pfff)
  - kmavm 14y ago
    Yes, exactly. Thanks for mentioning it.
- dxbydt 14y ago

cletus 14y ago

That's easy: the best recognize languages are just a means to an end. Language snobbery, in my experience, tends to be highly correlated with being a "wannabe" rather than "great" and a useful filter. You will find any number of C/C++ programmers who think you can't write anything in Java. Many Java programmers think you can't write anything (beyond 100 lines) in Python. Many Python programmers think you can't (or simply shouldn't) write anything in PHP. And so on. Some people are insecure. Some people can't separate their language from themselves (and see a criticism of their language as a criticism of them as people). Some people exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect [1]. Some, like teenagers, are just asserting their identities. Some simply have biases that are mental blocks. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

tomjen3 14y ago
Not all languages are equal. (if they are, why not just write everything in assembly?)
dxbydt 14y ago
That's a well-reasoned but rather lazy response imo. Ppl who have strong opinions when it comes to language design have strong opinions when it comes to language design. Ppl who think languages are just a means to an end think languages are just a means to an end. These are two differenty species and indicative of their particular worldview, attitude and preferences. To use that as any kind of filter is silly. Lets not look at CS for a second...If you want to know what a Stieltjes integral is, a probabilist will tell you one thing, a functional analyst another, and a measure theorist will give you yet another more pedantic definition. There's no right or wrong definition here...every one is coming at it with the tools they are more well versed in. The probabilist is the end-user, so to speak. He can't do his day to day work without internalizing it, because his bread and butter, the PDFs and CDFs of all the distributions he deals with, comes from Stieltjes. The functional analyst is going to use Stieltjes when he deals with Banach spaces, but otherwise he has other preoccupations. The measure theorist studies Stieltjes in depth because it goes to the very foundantion of measure theory...but he isn't really an end-user. Now back to CS...a C++ programmer will think of Java as an interesting toy because you don't get union types and pointers & so forth. The Java guy will think of Python as an interesting toy, and the Python guy thinks PHP is an interesting toy. None of this means any of these people are insecure or being a teenager. If the only goal in life is "languages as means to an end" where end = $$$ in the short term, then yeah, lets just cut to the chase and do PHP. But there are other goals, yeah ?
ScottBurson 14y ago
You have obviously never worked on a million-line codebase. When you have crap like this in your language: > E.g., $i = 0; $a[$i] = $i++; makes a different array than $i = 0; $a[$i + 0] = $i++; you have no hope of making a truly large program work. There are just too many sources of itsy bitsy bugs; you'll never find them all. (I'm not a PHP user; I have no idea why those are different arrays. Don't bother explaining; I don't want to know.)
- harshreality 14y ago
  I don't use PHP much, but I was curious, so here's the answer you don't want: You get $a[1] = 0 the first way, and $a[0] = 0 the second way. PHP seems to evaluate the array index before the right hand side if there is something more than a $variable to evaluate; otherwise PHP evaluates the array index after the right hand side, after $i has been incremented. I haven't used hiphop, but I'm curious if it preserves that disparity between arrays when translating to C++, or if it breaks PHP compatibility by making those two arrays equivalent.
  - kmavm 14y ago
    The entire point of my post was that we preserve the semantics of this (and many other) PHP-isms. We have to, because you never can tell which glitches useful code has come to depend on.
saraid216 14y ago
I like how people who exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect are entirely willing to cite it in order to look smart.

rargulati 14y ago

I'm not the best and the brightest, but I'm sure the people they are going after are more excited and concerned with the quality and quantity of problems that facebook is in the unique position to solve. They could probably care less what they use to solve said problems.

xxbondsxx 14y ago

The best and the brightest appreciate the technical, product, and engineering challenges of Facebook and certainly don't waste their time whining about a language or feeling entitled.

tomjen3 14y ago
Some of us like to write good code in a good language too. Maybe you should be the one to stop being so arrogant as to tell other people what they should feel.

kmavm 14y ago

The aspects of PHP that are bad (and there are more than a few) are easily tooled around. We have a review-time tool that parses your PHP, symbolically executes it, and looks for dubious idioms, flagging them for you and your reviewer. Meanwhile, PHP gets a number of things very right. For instance: * State: there is none across requests. Oh sure, there's APC, and the filesystem, and databases, etc., but those are all accessed via libraries. There is no PHP-level state that survives a request, which provides natural fault isolation: a request which goes wrong doesn't take the server down with it, or live on to corrupt other requests. * Concurrency: PHP's concurrency model is the web request. If you want to run some code in parallel, curl to localhost. If you wrap an appropriate library around this, it looks just like Erlang's actors. This is shared-nothing concurrency, which turns out to be a compelling local maximum. * Interactivity: The development workflow PHP provides is very productive. You save and load the page. You don't save, optionally recompile, restart the server, wait for it to initialize, forget what's different from the last three times you tried this because this has all taken three minutes and you forgot to write it down, etc. These three things turn out to be among the most important parts of a server-side language, and PHP gets them very, very right. The rightness was accidental, not by design, but this doesn't make it any less right. Also, the language itself can be improved. In the HipHop toolchain, -v Eval.EnableHipHopSyntax=true turns on a bunch of (backwards-compatible) features we've added to our PHP dialect, the most notable of which are XHP (syntax for using XML literals as PHP expressions) and generators (inspired by Python's, using similar 'yield' syntax). I put up some sample code for a talk just the other day, if you're curious: https://github.com/kmafb/hiphop-samples https://github.com/kmafb/hiphop-samples

swah 14y ago
Is that tooling you mentioned related to/uses 'pfff' ? (https://github.com/facebook/pfff https://github.com/facebook/pfff)
- kmavm 14y ago
  Yes, exactly. Thanks for mentioning it.
dxbydt 14y ago