News:
http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/facebook-unveils-hack-a-faster-programming-language-to-power-the-social-network/

Language's Page:
http://hacklang.org/

I thought Facebook would be using D in the future.

The reason for using their hack is probably legacy PHP code and experience carrying over; they can bring their existing staff and code to the new compiler then start bolting on new features one by one. Same reason they did the whole HipHop thing - trying to put some lipstick on PHP and now they're trying to polish it, one step at a time.

On 3/22/14, 10:39 AM, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
> News:
> http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/facebook-unveils-hack-a-faster-programming-language-to-power-the-social-network/
>
>
> Language's Page:
> http://hacklang.org/
>
> I thought Facebook would be using D in the future.

Hack is a front-end language that does not compete with D.

Andrei

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 17:39:57 UTC, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
> News:
> http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/facebook-unveils-hack-a-faster-programming-language-to-power-the-social-network/
>
> Language's Page:
> http://hacklang.org/
>
> I thought Facebook would be using D in the future.

Facebook is a composed of many different systems and uses many different languages. The front end code is made with hack. But many services and tooling are made with other languages. D is used for some of them.

I think Andrei will talk a bit more about this at DConf.

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 17:39:57 UTC, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
> News:
> http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/facebook-unveils-hack-a-faster-programming-language-to-power-the-social-network/
>
> Language's Page:
> http://hacklang.org/
>
> I thought Facebook would be using D in the future.

Beautiful as PHP...

Am 23.03.2014 05:36, schrieb Asman01:
> On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 17:39:57 UTC, Tolga Cakiroglu wrote:
>> News:
>> http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/facebook-unveils-hack-a-faster-programming-language-to-power-the-social-network/
>>
>>
>> Language's Page:
>> http://hacklang.org/
>>
>> I thought Facebook would be using D in the future.
>
> Beautiful as PHP...

It doesn't matter how beautiful a language is, as soon as you put them on the hands of an average developer, the result will be horrible.

But if the said developers deliver, that is everything the customer cares about. Regardless of what gets discussed about quality in software
conferences.

--
Paulu

On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 05:53:41 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> It doesn't matter how beautiful a language is, as soon as you put them on the hands of an average developer, the result will be horrible.
>
> But if the said developers deliver, that is everything the customer cares about. Regardless of what gets discussed about quality in software
> conferences.
>
> --
> Paulu

That's what is interesting about Facebook and PHP. PHP is a terrible language, we all know this. However the Facebook developers are obviously very good at what they do. So in the hands of them, they can do good things with PHP.

At the time Facebook started, I would argue that no other language could deliver the lifecycle PHP does, with all state needed for a request living and dying with each request, leaving it as just about the only thing which wouldn't slowly get worse over time. We are now at a stage where this is not the case, and other languages have web development toolkits stable enough to not cause gradual corruption. Still, I can recount a tale where upgrading to Django 1.5.0 at my office caused a memory leak, because of a bug in Django which was fixed in the next patch. This kind of problem was very common years ago.

On Sunday, 23 March 2014 at 05:53:41 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> It doesn't matter how beautiful a language is, as soon as you put them on the hands of an average developer, the result will be horrible.

:-) I like that comment.

Fortunately most web requests are simple to handle, so PHP and Perl are quite sufficient. Both PHP and Perl succeeded originally because they embraced C-ish syntax and common C libraries and their APIs which made them easy to use casually for programmers who dealt with unix/C regularly.

Less to memorize. Low threshold for entry.

> But if the said developers deliver, that is everything the customer cares about.

True. Since many users are now used to PHP-based forums and Wordpress and their UIs/feature set, it becomes more difficult to push better platforms (with different feature sets).

Almost all full featured forum software packages are written in PHP. That is kind of scary.

On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 18:34:15 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> Hack is a front-end language that does not compete with D.

Why don't you think D should be used for front-end?

--
/Jacob Carlborg