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I'd love to hear Mark Zuckerberg reply to this.

I find it interesting that Facebook preferred rewriting the entire PHP interpreter to make code execute faster, rather than use another language.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, the very initial versions of Facebook were written mostly in Perl, so it's not like Zuckerberg was stuck with PHP since day 1.

Why would they rewrite if their entire staff knew PHP already and there wasn't any guarantee that the new language would perform at their scale as is?

I'm not a fan of PHP but I don't think their issues could have been solved by simply porting over to another language.

AFIAK it was never written in perl. An anecdote from the facebook effect is when Dustin Moskovitz wanted to work on FB. He went home and learned Perl, to which Mark replied "dude, the site's not written in perl".

http://books.google.ca/books?id=RRUkLhyGZVgC&lpg=PA34&ots=LR...

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