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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.

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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.

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

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