I keep hearing people mention Facebook as a reason why PHP is a great development language but they compile it down to C++ using their HipHop compiler, and from what I understand they develop Facebook _in spite of_ PHP ( http://www.quora.com/Do-Facebook-engineers-enjoy-programming... )
I got downvoted on another PHP related thread here for bringing that up. Can you truly say they use PHP when they've invested a hell of a lot of money into HipHop to essentially allow devs to write additional PHP code and transform it into C++ binaries? It's a strange way of using it for sure, but it seems to be effective for them.
Right, but Facebook supposedly receives 1 billion new comments + a couple billion likes + a couple hundred million status updates daily, and is probably the largest photo sharing site on the net. Twitter gets about 200 million tweets daily and Reddit has 250 million comments total. Disqus is not much larger than Reddit.
So, since most people here are suggesting Python or Ruby, what real world example can we provide that compares to Facebook in order to make sure that these languages would perform better than PHP?
Neither Twitter, nor Reddit or Disqus are exactly the most stable and performant sites out there. So?
I would say that quick and dirty comparisons like this are meaningless.
Google is the real-world example of Python deployment you're looking for, although we don't have the full details of where it begins and ends in their no doubt complex stack. So again, the comparison isn't that useful.
Talking about what languages programmers find enjoyable and productive is perhaps more meaningful. This is where Python and Ruby shine, and PHP falters.
Yes, you can truly say they use PHP. You are confusing the language and the interpreter. I've seen Facebook engineers comment on threads like this and say the same thing I just have.
