Hack Isn't PHP

I&#x27;m not much of a PHP coder, so I tend to watch these flamewars from a distance on the sidelines.<p>However, I&#x27;ve never really understood why people criticize or mock Facebook for pouring so many resources into PHP. For building cross-compilers, toolchains, and syntactic extensions on top of a language that is seen as a fundamentally weak foundation.<p>I mean, I DO understand all of those criticisms. I just don&#x27;t get how the same people can then turn around and use CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Dart, and even Node.js on the <i></i>server-side<i></i>. Compared to a JavaScript foundation, PHP is bedrock!

&gt; This is exactly what the PHP world needed: making its already-fast performance many times faster (amplifying one of PHP’s biggest advantages over other common web languages)<p>I think PHPs speed is largely exaggerated here. The interpreter always used to be slow, and before the bytecode cache it was plain awful. Im pretty sure it only ever got away with it because so much of the standard library is thin wrapping. Is it really faster than CPython like for like?

Zend the organisation, is probably what Marco meant when referring to poor stewardship, instead of the OS project Zend Framework.<p>I like Hack because it explicitly doesn&#x27;t support[0] a bunch of cruft from PHP. It feels a lot to me like the BC-breaking PHP.next people want - easy to switch to for modern applications, but not hindered by supporting PHP 4 code. Bit early to start pointing fingers at it&#x27;s future though.<p>[0]: <a href="http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.unsupported.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.hhvm.com&#x2F;manual&#x2F;en&#x2F;hack.unsupported.php</a>

&gt; PHP isn’t a great language, but it is a good language [...] it’s just as possible to write good, well-structured code in PHP as in most other languages<p>That isn&#x27;t what &quot;good language&quot; means.

&gt;It’s developed and supported exclusively by one huge web company, and they may decide to deprecate and replace it in a few years as their technical needs change or its core engineers move on to new projects.<p>Thats an interesting sentiment. The exact same could be said for languages like Go (Google), C# (Microsoft), Rust (Mozilla) and platforms like NodeJS (Joyent). In any case it doesn&#x27;t seem like too much of a worry. Cassandra came from Facebook, and was well done enough that another company came in and picked up development when Facebook left it.

&gt; It’s developed and supported exclusively by one huge web company, and they may decide to deprecate and replace it in a few years<p>Other than the &quot;web&quot; bit, isn&#x27;t that true of most new languages, where $proposer is google, microsoft, typesafe, mozilla, redhat, netbrains?<p>Should people feel more secure if instead of being built and used by one large corporation it was built and used by a single guy? Or should we prefer not to have a big company supporting it?

This is hilarious because he was the lead developer at Tumblr.<p>I saw Tumblrs &#x27;original&#x27; code base and it&#x27;s a giant cluster fuck that is full of horrible design decisions.<p>They are still in tons of technical debt because of it. So it&#x27;s funny to see him give an insight on PHP. Kind of ironic.<p>Either way, Facebook’s HHVM is not for 99% of PHP developers. Most PHP developers need better cache coverage and proper SQL architecture and approach.<p>Execution speed is not a problem for most of them.

&gt; PHP isn’t a great language, but it is a good language.<p>So what is a great language? If it runs the largest active user app on the planet (FB), the most widely used CMSes (WP,Drupal,EE), message boards, MVPs, etc. Why continue the hate, then end the article on how you&#x27;ve chosen it as the greatest option to run some of your systems.

It not just the performance or code snippets available on internet for a particular language that matters to a programmer. The community around the stacks you are using to build the product is equally important.

&gt; it&#x27;s easy to learn<p>compared to what? IMO an easy to learn language has very little surprises, is consistent and names things intuitively. Would you say that php as the language is easier to learn than ruby or python?

Great article, pretty much sums up my opinion on the language. (And the same goes for Dart, TypeScript and many other `Newspeaks`: &quot;Run in masses towards our beautiful shiny freedom handcuffs!&quot;)

&gt;pure PHP will become a less-tested second-class citizen on HHVM<p>Not really true because HHVM has to run basic PHP before it can apply the Hack annotation. You can pull out the annotations and it&#x27;s still PHP.

Question about PHP, is it the BASIC of the web dev languages? Easy to write terrible code, possible to write good code, derided by many, loved by many of the same (secretly).

so new language built by mega corp on top of debated language hasn&#x27;t garnered enough trust and buy-in to facilitate mainstream use?<p>Seems fair - I do like the static typing of hack though. Weak typing has its place but it can become a real PITA (looking at you javascript).

He says it&#x27;s like &quot;PHP++&quot; but I like to say it&#x27;s more like P#P.

&gt; Expert Sexchange<p>Hahaha! Bigotry is funny! Hahaha!