"(And strictly speaking, Facebook isn’t written in PHP; it’s written in a C++ macro language with a striking resemblance.)" I'm a Facebook engineer who works on the HipHop compiler and HipHop virtual machine. It's in PHP, absolutely full stop. It's amazing how much the fact that g++ is involved somewhere in the toolchain confuses people in this matter. C++ is just an intermediate representation; the source language really is warts-and-all PHP.

I'm going to be unfair and quote just two words from the article: > empowered amateur PHP is a gateway drug to web development. And that's awesome. With almost every other popular web development language I've heard of[1], there's this grey area between "my app works on my local machine" and "my app works on the server" that is really hard to grok as a beginner. There's a reason entire businesses are built on the idea of making this easy. With PHP? You get an apache box with PHP, you put

Meh, I've written a lot of PHP code. I also work in Ruby and Python. All three have problems, but I like all three. With PHP, you have to develop a coding style that naturally avoids PHP's weird areas. It's not really that hard to avoid the mines, but you do have to be aware of them. In exchange, you get a scalable web server and a language that requires minimal babysitting. Instead of automatically throwing a 500 on a random, unimportant, uncaught exception, PHP makes a best effort, and most

I enjoy Eevee's posts. I was first introduced to him through a handful of Pokémon sites where users would reverse-engineer the Pokémon games and protocols. He writes good code and knows his stuff. He even offered some assistance when I was writing a .pkm file manipulation package. I completely agree with most everything in this post, too. It can all be summarized in this sentence later down the page: > PHP is a minefield. You can measure a language's design by how often you shake your hea

I had a one-to-one talk with Rasmus Lerdorf a few weeks ago. This is one of the few things he said: "I wrote PHP as a hammer to do my stuff. Around 1993, the only way to write web apps was by hacking C and Perl. This was extremely painful, and you would have to do the same thing over and over again. So I started writing a tool which would make my work easier." "I never thought while writing PHP that someday millions of people will be looking over my shoulder into my code. If I would have known

This is just another example of someone beating a dead horse (which has already been beaten) for page views. Next week we'll have another "bash php" post, and the week after that another. I wish people spent as much time creating new things as they did bitching. As well written as this article is, it contains absolutely nothing that hasn't been said ten thousand times already- in fact, most of this seems to be regurgitated from those other articles rather than being actual original thought. Som