Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) engineers Bryan O’Sullivan, Alok Menghrajani and Julien Verlaguet built a programming language that drives almost all of Facebook, and they have named it Hack. The language lets developers build complex websites quickly while organizing the code and keeping it free from flaws. This is something no other programming language has accomplished, yet.
O’Sullivan shared, “We can say with complete assurance that this has been as battle-tested as it can possibly be.” This morning, the language was publicly announced, and it will be open sourced so, anyone can use and make amendments to it as they see fit. Programming rock star, David Pollak, asserted that if this language is associated with O’Sullivan he would, “walk across hot coals to use it.”
Back in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg used PHP to create Facebook, which was one of the most popular languages of that time. It is a dynamically typed language which lets you run code immediately after you create it. You don’t have to define specific parameters for every code routine. Not to mention, PHP is automatically compiled for you.
For most of Facebook’s life, PHP was still used as Zuckerberg’s language of choice. However, when the site grew to hundreds of millions of users, PHP began to feel more constrained for the company. Because, when a PHP site gets larger, you need more servers to run it than you would with other languages. Massive websites, like Facebook, do better with Java. However, Java does not allow you to move quickly when writing the code. It takes much longer than writing PHP.
O’Sullivan gave the motivation behind creating Hack, “As our engineering team grew, their own jobs were becoming more complicated because PHP is a dynamically typed language. It made it harder for them to easily apprehend the consequences of some of the work they were doing.” Hack is as fast as PHP, it can run without compiling and it uses computer servers more efficiently. All of these things are good for Facebook and developers, as well.
