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Comment by jtreminio | Hacker News Reader

I sure had no idea Box uses PHP.

Does anyone have a rough census of what top websites use? I've had this same reaction, but more than once with PHP: I know now that at least Box, Wikipedia, and Facebook use PHP.

Mailchimp also does.

Facebook doesn't use PHP the way other companies do. They ship & run binaries via HipHop/HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) in production. Other companies which use Facebook as an excuse (justification) to use PHP in production ship standard PHP scripts into Production and think they are doing the same thing Facebook does.

True, although didn't that happen only after many years of them using regular PHP in production? IIRC, HipHop dev only really got going in the 2010s.

True, although that was after four failed attempts to move away from PHP and realizing due to incumbent inertia they had to find an alternative solution. Enter HipHop. I am sure that today if they had to start over, PHP would not even be considered ;-) My main point is that in "today's times" using Facebook as a excuse (reason) for opting for PHP is not a wise move.

And didn't the MediaWiki people say they'd prefer to not use PHP, but it's hard to change?

Pointing out that some large system uses a specific technology just means that it wasn't impossible to scale and use that technology. You can write a book with a quill pen; it doesn't necessarily make it the best tech to use in a modern publishing workflow. But if that's all you know how to use, don't let it stop you from writing.