If you look at all the value that Facebook (and many other companies) have derived from working with PHP, it's definitely a "because of PHP's strengths" and "in spite of PHP's problems".
No technology is perfect, but imperfect technology that lets you Get Stuff Done(tm) goes a long way.
What strengths of PHP are you referring to here? TCB (Taking Care of Business) seems to be a programmer trait. Considering they have written their own implementation of PHP it seems like PHP didn't offer them much other than then original authors knew how to write it. I could be talking about any language in that case.
Yeah, but I think most of their work "around PHP" is more like "distributing computation to a larger scale than before". So the language doesn't matter that much, they've hit and overcame many fundamental problems that no other stack would have solved for them.
The only thing mentioned in the interview is HipHop, which has nothing to do with distributed computing. PHP is slow and they're trying to make it faster because moving to a different platform would be too disruptive. That's how I'm reading it, but maybe you have more information.
Facebook has released a bunch of distributed computing stuff, including a database (Hive), distributed logging and monitoring system. And that's just the part that's been open sourced.
Of course they do lots of other stuff, like Hive, that is completely unrelated to PHP. I never doubted that. But Alexandrescu was talking about PHP as a language and as a runtime. All the PHP specific things they do seem to be about fixing things that they wouldn't have to fix if they had chosen a different platform like Java or SBCL common lisp or Haskell or C#.
Nobody seems to really understand what votes are supposed to express in a debate. We do have words after all. But as long as there is no exchange rate for converting karma into dollars I remain unfazed ;-) Thanks for your support anyway.
