On: Reasonable Scala Compiler

[carlosdp]

That's... not true. You mention Kotlin, that was developed by JetBrains as a better language to develop Intellij and plugins.

Hack/HHVM was developed by Facebook to modernize PHP.

There are plenty of cases where organizations successfully developed their own languages/compilers that gave them advantages. It's insane only if you have no good reason to do it. This sounds like they have a need: compile times are slow.

[sk5t → carlosdp]

JetBrains' business and expertise is language stuff, lexers, compilers--isn't it fair to give them a pass on making a language?

One needn't extend the same consideration to, say, fogcreek...

[zug_zug → carlosdp]

you think compile times are so slow that they're saving time by writing a whole language? I'd like to see the numbers on that...

[carlosdp → zug_zug]

We're talking about a large organization that probably does 1000s or 10000s of builds a day, so yea it might

[hasenj → carlosdp]

> Hack/HHVM was developed by Facebook to modernize PHP.

Yes but why use PHP in the first place? It's not the right tool for something like Facebook.

[Joeri → hasenj]

In 2003 PHP was the most sensible choice for rapid prototyping of a web app and for early facebook it was more important to iterate and experiment than build it right. Even today it still holds its own, but there are plenty of alternatives (rails, node.js, ...)