Hacker News Reader

It's more than a bit disingenuous to call Facebook's work on Hack and the HHVM an abandonment of PHP. A big part of the HHVM project was writing a formal PHP spec, and features from Hack have been making their way into mainstream PHP (generators in 5.5; static types in 7).

It would be much more accurate to say that Facebook has invested heavily in PHP by financing an alternative runtime.

"take on a well-designed language like Python or Ruby or Javascript" I like Javascript and Node.js BUT please do not call it a well-designed language. Strict mode makes it a lot better and ECMAcript 6 is great. Even the people that invented it recognized that it had more than a few design flaw.

As time passes and better engineers that understand computer languages get involved in the core development, things have been drastically improved. This is true for Javascript, Python, and, yes, also for PHP.

I love JavaScript, but I completely agree.

Arguably the best JavaScript book is titled "JavaScript: the good parts." That is a pretty clear message that there are a lot of bad parts around.

JavaScript is well designed? Of course, 'well' is not very precise. But considering how fast it was created, how many translate-to-JS languages there are, at best I'd call it 'best possible design in 10 days' (http://www.quora.com/In-which-10-days-of-May-did-Brendan-Eic...)

> how many translate-to-JS languages there are

I'd call it well designed AND most-misunderstood for this very reason.

And this 10-day argument really makes me smile every time I see it. You're barely using anything that was designed in 10 days, ES6 is already here and it changed thing a lot.

I would call the ability not to be misunderstood a very important design requirement. I'm using ES6, it didn't change almost anything for me. Even the official docs say it is minimalistic improvement, just syntactic sugar. I like the string interpolation, but the class keyword doesn't really do much more than prototype.method =. There isn't really inheritance, super doesn't do what anyone expects, 'this' is not improved. At least 'let' helps with scoping problems.

You don't find it ironic that you said "most-misunderstood" in a discussion about language, and somehow thought this is a problem worth overlooking?

Well its really not a problem of the language if people keep trying to shove their type systems (typescript) or functional syntactic sugar (coffee - some of it made into standards at least) while those understanding it continue to be successful with it.

> Python and Ruby will be with us for a long time, but PERL and PHP will die an ugly death

> On the JVM we have things like Grails on Groovy, Clojure and Scala which have strong development teams and visions for the future.

> PHP, like PERL, just doesn't fit in any more.

It's because you don't understand PHP's users perspective that you say these things. PHP isn't going away anytime soon. The most popular CMSs are written in PHP, not in Ruby,Python or Clojure. In the small business space, PHP is king, not Scala nor Groovy. Of course it's your opinion, but it's not based on any facts.

I don't get why so many people seem to be biased against PHP. It isn't an awful language or anything.

What do you think an awful language should do?

> On the JVM we have things like Grails on Groovy, Clojure and Scala

Grails is related to Groovy, but not to Clojure or to Scala. I'm sure you just typed it wrong, but I'm correcting you because some readers might get confused.

To be more precise, Groovy runs on Grails, not vice versa. And almost all of Grails, even Grails 3.0 just released, is written in Java, not Groovy. Groovy is merely provided for use by website builders using Grails. This is different to frameworks using Clojure and Scala, which not only provide the respective language for website builders, but are generally also written in the language rather than Java.