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Using PHP as the primary development language

I'm not sure that's true. PHP is certainly the language that generates the HTML the user sees, but I REALLY doubt all the computation on the social graph (i.e. the clever/resource hungry bit of Facebook) is done in PHP.

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But one of the reasons we're very lucky is our engineering team has selected to use PHP as the primary development language. That allows us to use a fairly generic server type. So we, with a couple of exceptions, have three main server types and run a fairly homogeneous environment, which allows us to then consolidate our buying power.

Scary, but that's what he said. Could be why they need another $100 million for servers. ;)

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