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General Discussion

Posted by Jeff Busch
Jeff Busch
19,287 Points

Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future?

Just wondering if anyone knows anything about Hack. Maybe it's too new.

Jeff

3 Answers

Dino Paškvan
PLUS
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points
Dino Paškvan
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points

The only "programming languages of the future" are the ones that people actually end up using. And considering the language was announced some 5 hours ago, I think it might be too soon to tell. :)

Seriously though, I imagine the real strength behind Hack is actually the HHVM. As it features JIT compiling of PHP code into C++, adding some additional features to PHP will allow HHVM to optimize the code even further.

And that's all that Hack appears to be at a first glance — a bunch of stuff that's been added to PHP.

I'll probably give it a go eventually, after some real world examples show up, something I can tinker with.

Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points
Andrew McCormick
Andrew McCormick
17,730 Points

I love some of the comments on that article.
I agree though, put under all the other ground breaking new languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

Dino Paškvan
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points

I actually hadn't read the article, just the press release/blog post when it was announced. I went to read it now, and suddenly I feel a migraine coming on.

Mike Baxter
Mike Baxter
4,442 Points
Mike Baxter
Mike Baxter
4,442 Points

Well, PHP started off as one man's project to build his personal website. Maybe there's some legitimacy behind a Hack, being that it was developed by the engineers behind one of the biggest sites on the internet.

Dino Paškvan
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 Points

Fair enough, but I'd rather see new additions to PHP itself than a language built on top of it. Maybe that's just me, though, I never liked the fragmentation that such implementations result in (e.g. CoffeScript/TypeScript/HeyIAddedOneNewThingToJavaScriptSoImRenamingItScript).

Mike Baxter
Mike Baxter
4,442 Points

Yeah, I don't actually like spin-off languages that much, and I was skeptical about it going into the article, and I really don't like the article's approach. But ignoring the article and thinking about it as a concept, Facebook has a lot of servers, and a lot of developers, and a LOT of users. If it's helping them out in that very real case, then it's probably worth taking a good look at.