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0 pointsderefr12y ago0 comments

> Just so we are clear, you ask why Facebook didn't rewrite 10,000 human-years of code into a mythical unnamed "proper" ...

You don't need to rewrite anything (at least, not all at once.) Personally, I'd have expected you to make something akin to CoffeeScript or ClojureScript that targets PHP, and can "link with" your existing PHP modules (or rather, with their HHVM bytecode representations.) Then treat the PHP code as a constantly-dwindling Big Ball of Mud (http://laputan.org/mud/).

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7 comments · 3 top-level

elgenie12y ago· 3 in thread

> Personally, I'd have expected you to make something akin to CoffeeScript or ClojureScript that targets PHP, and can "link with" your existing PHP modules.

We took a similar approach to what you described. Then we called it Hack.

This is what we mean by seamless inter-operation: the HHVM runtime understands both syntaxes and runs both <?php and <?hh code in the same process. Whether Hack integrates into the runtime at the parsing (current) or bytecode (future?) layer is an implementation detail.

derefrOP12y ago

But the syntax you've got now is effectively a superset of PHP, and comes with all the problems of PHP. You've effectively wrapped your Big Ball of Mud... in slightly different-colored mud. The whole point of a clean-break-targeting-interoperability like this is that you can stop using mud at all, and it'll still work with what you've got now. In fact, what other reason would you have?

If you mean that future versions of Hack will evolve to have a different syntax, while still targeting the runtime... then you'll still have code around from the intermediate era, and you'll have to interoperate with that too, won't you? You'll have PHP, PHP-looking-Hack, and actually-nice-to-code-in-Hack.

DeGuerre12y ago

PHP's syntax is not what's preventing you from writing large maintainable systems in it. Many of the more successful languages throughout history became successful BECAUSE they used a syntax that's superficially similar to something familiar.

That's not to say that syntax doesn't matter, but semantics and pragmatics tends to matter more, despite Wadler's Law of Language Design stating that most people don't understand this.

ufo12y ago

I think you are putting way too much emphasis on syntax here. The important contribution of Hack is the type system and this is something that a syntactic-sugar translator like Coffeescript can't hope to achieve.

I also wouldn't count Clojurescript here. Its a whole different language that just happensto compile down to JS.

vhata12y ago· 1 in thread

That is essentially what Hack is.

GhostHardware12y ago

Very suitable name for a language then.

copergi12y ago

That's exactly what they did, that's what they are announcing here.

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