This is not about taking PHP seriously. This is about taking Facebooks internal development language _based_ on PHP seriously. By the time you factor in a different run time and the various language extensions they have made you no longer have PHP. In fact everything they have done has been to turn their existing PHP codebase into a better language and to their credit they have added some excellent tools to make that migration smooth. The question is at what point are you no longer writing PHP but writing facebook PHP with a VM that still lacks documentation and in the name of backwards compatibility carried forward the warts of the old PHP.
The point as I understood was that for all of PHP's faults, (almost by accident) it managed to get certain things right, or at least right for the Web in the time in the time of it's heyday.
These being, chiefly, that the much-maligned document-based scripting model turns out to be really easy to package, deploy, and most of all, to learn. And that it also (again by accident) happens to be in some ways easier to program safely in, compared to handler-response based frameworks.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't see these as anywhere close to redeeming strengths for PHP. It's still a crappy language, all the cheerleading and apologetics from the likes of FB and Etsy notwithstanding. But the presentation does make some interesting points.
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This is not about taking PHP seriously. This is about taking Facebooks internal development language _based_ on PHP seriously. By the time you factor in a different run time and the various language extensions they have made you no longer have PHP. In fact everything they have done has been to turn their existing PHP codebase into a better language and to their credit they have added some excellent tools to make that migration smooth. The question is at what point are you no longer writing PHP but writing facebook PHP with a VM that still lacks documentation and in the name of backwards compatibility carried forward the warts of the old PHP.
This is not about taking PHP seriously.
The point as I understood was that for all of PHP's faults, (almost by accident) it managed to get certain things right, or at least right for the Web in the time in the time of it's heyday.
These being, chiefly, that the much-maligned document-based scripting model turns out to be really easy to package, deploy, and most of all, to learn. And that it also (again by accident) happens to be in some ways easier to program safely in, compared to handler-response based frameworks.
Don't get me wrong -- I don't see these as anywhere close to redeeming strengths for PHP. It's still a crappy language, all the cheerleading and apologetics from the likes of FB and Etsy notwithstanding. But the presentation does make some interesting points.