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Comment by leothekim | Hacker News Reader

PHP got Facebook up and running, so it has that to its credit. And that's a huge credit.

As a result, Facebook engineers developed things like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP

Which is an impressive piece of technology, but makes you wonder if Facebook engineers wish their website wasn't written in PHP.

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It surprised me, considering the original developers of facebook (Zuckerberg, Moskovitz) were doing Computer Science degrees why they chose PHP to build it in initially. Did they consider other languages, or frameworks.

I'd be surprised if they chose PHP because of future hireability / scaling up. I'd guess they didn't give it much thought and PHP was just there.

I'm pretty sure it was solely because Zuck happened to have a LAMP host at his disposal at the time.

In the early part of this century, PHP was basically still the free language for writing dynamic web content.

The second place choice was probably perl (via cgi or mod_perl).

I guess Tomcat was around too.

Both Django and Rails were released after facebook.

Possibly, but its possible that if another language had been chosen, it may still be languishing as some half-finished forgotten project somewhere and those engineers would never have gotten their jobs!

Who knows...

You don't need to wonder, they've said it.

http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/Why-did-Quora-choo...

Facebook is stuck with PHP for their legacy codebase, but you'll note they avoid it for new code that isn't tied to the existing codebase.

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