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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I think the only hope PHP has of continuing development is if someone big like Facebook can add some direction to it. Maybe they will but I think last I checked even they were giving up on using it for much more then a thin veneer to their back end services.

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Even if a large company like Facebook did want to help add direction, they'd have to do so within the confines of internals and the RFC process.

The prehistoric luddites and trolls on the list would shout down any truly language-improving proposals in the same way they always do, regardless of source.

The only way to get rid of those unwanted elements would be a fork, but that would be unproductive. The remaining thing keeping PHP so popular is how amazingly ubiquitous it is. A fork wouldn't have that advantage, especially in comparison to languages and environments that are objectively better anyway.

> The remaining thing keeping PHP so popular is how amazingly ubiquitous it is. A fork wouldn't have that advantage, especially in comparison to languages and environments that are objectively better anyway.

Initially, I believe you are correct, but I am not sure long term. PHP is easy for a system admin to install. Other than perl, I am not sure if there is anything out there that is as easy. I would imagine a fork, if it wants to survive, would need to be just as easy.

I do wonder why PHP has never really had any competition in the "super easy for my system admin" category.

It's not just ease of installation by sysadmins, but ease of use on shared hosting and ease of script installation by non-developers.

I can walk my mother through installation of a PHP script. I can almost walk her through installation of a CGI script in any language, really. But unless that shared host has already set up a Python or Ruby environment (few do; I can count the ones I know on my left hand), I'd never, ever dream of trying to walk her through setting up something in other languages.

Making running scripts as easy as dropping them onto a filesystem would be perhaps the killer feature for other languages to target, if they want to take a bite out of PHP's consumer market share.

Of course, then there's another battle: shared hosting providers. The vast majority are running some sort of third-party control panel software with very opinionated hooks deep into every bit of configuration on the machine. Unless that killer feature can be baked into that software, and unless the shared host actually updates their software, there's no hope.

You wouldn't believe how many shared hosts are running ten+ year old installations of everything, not giving a crap that they're out of date. And hey, that ten year old version of PHP still installed there is still going to work just fine with the majority of scripts...

A lot of things are becoming extremely easy to install though. With the growth of AWS and cloud-services I'd guess there will be movement away over the next 5 years.

I have not seen anything that comes close (other than CGI scripts) from either the system admin side or the client code side. I would love to know if other folks are addressing this. The closest (well, other than Perl) is some of the tooling surrounding Java deployment.

Indeed, Facebook is already using their own fork of PHP.

I read the entire sub-tree under this comment and still cannot figure out what exactly Facebook is written in. Is this because nobody at Facebook actually knows what the entire stack looks like or because they keep it a secret?

With their "Move fast, break things" motto I can only shudder at the imagination of the scenarios happening at Facebook HQ:

"Hey, so you are the new developer in town? Can you build service X which service Y and Z can use? Just write a proper API, we need this ASAP."

- "So what do I write this service in? Any framework already build to support these operations?"

"Pick your poison! Check our internal repository collection and see if you can re-use anything useful. As long as we can communicate with it via the API!"

Facebook isn't built with PHP (using hiphop-php) anymore?

The PHP code is the tip of the iceberg. The real work in Facebook is done by the many systems behind it, which are very definitely not written in PHP.

Facebook is entirely written in PHP. It uses all sorts of databases and other systems to handle stuff, but so does every other website. It's still written in PHP.

Facebook has their own PHP fork, which they use/and modify. I do not believe that Facebook pushes their modifications to PHP as a whole.

AFAIK it's not true. First they don't use raw php: https://github.com/facebook/xhp/wiki

Then they use it only for the view layer, it only pull some data from memcache to render HTML.

But all the hard work is C++ / Java / Tornado / etc

Correct me if I am wrong, but very few large scale project (if any at all) use raw PHP. Most of them rely on some kind of framework. Besides FB said it themselves that large portion of their code is PHP.

Well, that would presumably mean that the bulk of their code is view code. Which, by line count, probably makes sense.

The front end is PHP, but I thought they used other languages (such as Scala, Erlang, and C++).

I found a page from 2010, but I couldn't find a more up-to-date source.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/facebook-work-nuts-bolts-techno...

Those "databases and other systems" make up a significant portion of their code base, and in many cases Facebook either contributes to their development or created them internally. To claim that Facebook is written entirely in PHP is false. Examples:

- Cassandra (Java) was created by Facebook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra

- Giraph (Java) has significant contributions from Facebook and I believe was founded there http://giraph.apache.org/

- FP (Erlang IIRC) at Facebook http://cufp.org/videos/functional-programming-facebook

- Facebook's page listing some of the open source projects they contribute to https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

The last link you posted has this though; "PHP is an incredibly popular scripting language which makes up the majority of our code-base. Its simple syntax lets us move fast and iterate on products." Not sure if I believe it though.

Alright, let me correct myself then. The "frontend" of Facebook is written entirely in PHP.

The backend is written in everything from Erlang to C++.

Don't correct yourself. The majority of the backend is written in PHP as well.

Hip Hop is giving up on PHP internals while not having to throw out legacy code [immediately anyway]. They might for all I know still use plain PHP for some things but the Hip Hop project is not a vote of confidence.

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