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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Jake was built for news articles and prerendered all pages. News staff was able to quickly localize templates (10+ lanuages, 20+ products). That was 1999 when we didn't use Javascript or CSS, tested pages on Netscape Navigator 2 and WML (for mobile phones) became hot topic. Later Jake was misused for all kinds of other products mainly because of locali[sz]ation, permission management etc. Yeah, debugging was hard. It was the right tool at that point in time to handle high requests-per-second. Yahoo hired Rasmus Lerdorf and switched to PHP starting 2002.

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> Yahoo hired Rasmus Lerdorf and switched to PHP starting 2002.

Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration. When I left Yahoo Europe in 2005, there was still Perl all over the place both in Europe and the US at least. I managed the Yahoo Europe billing system, and that was mostly Perl on the backend, for example.

[small world, btw., courtesy of some minor profile-stalking: I interviewed with Ed about a position a few years back; your service looks interesting - I have a client that might be interested]

Yahoo Europe's progress was from Perl generated static html, to Perl generated PHP.

What Rasmus' hire did was push Yahoo to allow server-side scripting languages on the web server. And that's where PHP was the blindingly obvious choice. (though, I would not be surprised if there was a bun-fight with mod_perl...)

In the teams I worked with, there was thankfully no Perl-generated anything (but I know my boss had to deal with that with a couple of the other teams reporting in to him). We had plenty of Perl on the backend, though, and the US billing team constantly breathing down our neck to do their OneRewriteToBindThemAll in PHP (they had been working on that for a while when I joined in 2003, and were still working on it when I left beginning of 2006; it was a laudable goal - there were something like 8 billing systems worldwide at that point - but it took them a lot of time to figure out how to unify all the international requirements).

The funny thing was that on the instances I heard Rasmus talk, he complained we were taking it too far - he wanted simple PHP templates, not the kind of large PHP applications the US billing team and others were doing. He sounded quite exasperated about it last time I was at one of his talks.

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